Kenny B. > Kenny's Quotes

“The one who has conquered himself is a far greater hero than he who has defeated a thousand times a thousand men.”
― Dhammapada, The Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Albert Einstein

“With mind distracted, never thinking, "Death is coming,"
To slave away on the pointless business of mundane life,
And then to come out empty--it is a tragic error. (116)
trans by Robert Thurman”
― Huston Smith, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Liberation Through Understanding the Between

“We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.”
― Kalu Rinpoche

“Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you that music has boundaries. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.”
― Charlie Parker

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge”
― Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

“We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh

“One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.”
― Erich Fromm

“We are most nearly ourselves when we achieve the seriousness of the child at play.”
― Heraclitus

“Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“I knew that we counted little in comparison with the universe, I knew that we were nothing; but to be so immeasurably nothing seems in some way both to overwhelm and at the same time to reassure. Those figures, those dimensions beyond the range of human thought, are utterly overpowering. Is there anything whatsoever to which we can cling? Amid that chaos of illusions into which we are cast headlong, there is one thing that stands out as true, and that is---love. All the rest is nothingness, an empty void. We peer down into a huge dark abyss. And we are afraid.”
― Julien Green, Personal record, 1928-1939

“We pass through elementary school, high school, and maybe college, and in one sense every diploma is an award for developing a more sophisticated ignorance. Education reinforces the habit of seeing the world through a certain lens. We”
― Tenzin Wangyal, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not spinning webs or building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly connecting and controlling the story we tell others - and ourselves - about who we are.”
― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.”
― Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

“Dividing earth and sky
is not the right way
to think about this wholeness.
It only allows one to live
at a more precise address--
were I to be searched for
I'd be found much faster.
My distinguishing marks
are rapture and despair.


From 'Sky', in the collection 'Miracle Fair”
― Wislawa Szymborska

“Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
― Simone Weil

“He that increaseth wisdom, increaseth sorrow.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“I don't think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“Consolation

Calm down. Both your sins and your good deeds will be lost in oblivion.”
― Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001

“To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent.

What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus

“when serpents bargain for the right to squirm
and the sun strikes to gain a living wage -
when thorns regard their roses with alarm
and rainbows are insured against old age

when every thrush may sing no new moon in
if all screech-owls have not okayed his voice
- and any wave signs on the dotted line
or else an ocean is compelled to close

when the oak begs permission of the birch
to make an acorn - valleys accuse their
mountains of having altitude - and march
denounces april as a saboteur

then we’ll believe in that incredible
unanimal mankind (and not until)”
― E. E. Cummings