Nancy Peden > Nancy's Quotes

“We could decide simply to remain absorbed in the mysterious, unformed, free-play of reality. This would be the choice of the mystic who seeks to extinguish himself in God or Nirvana—analogous perhaps to the tendency among artists to obliterate themselves with alcohol or opiates. But if we value our participation in a shared reality in which it makes sense to make sense, then such self-abnegation would deny a central element of our humanity: the need to speak and act, to share our experience with others.”
― Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening

“Salvator ambulado. (It is solved by walking.)”
― Saint Augustine (Bishop of Hippo.)

“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes and having fun”
― Mary Lou Cook

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“Too excited to be genuinely happy”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“There's no friends like the old friends.”
― James Joyce, Dubliners

“It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.”
― Sally Kempton

“Men define intelligence, men define usefulness, men tell us what is beautiful, men even tell us what is womanly”
― Sally Kempton

“As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become "other," the outsider whose experience and tradition is too "alien" to comprehend.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“Patanjali, Buddha, Moses and Jesus did not go to workshops or seminars or even churches. They went directly to nature: sat under a Bodhi tree or on top of a mountain or in a cave. … It is time to return to the source of this inspiration – the earth itself.”
― Dolores Lachapelle, Earth Wisdom

“..every time scientists try to observe the quantum world they disturb it. And because at least one quantum of energy must always be involved, there is no way the size of this disturbance can be reduced.

Our acts of observing the universe, our attempts to gather knowledge, are no longer strictly objective because in seeking to know the universe we act to disturb it. Science prides itself on objectivity, but now Nature is telling us we never see a pure, pristine and objective quantum world. In every act of observation the observing subject enters into the cosmos and disturbs it in an irreducible way.

Science is like photographing a series of close ups with your back to the sun. No matter which way you move, your shadow always falls across the scene you photograph. No matter what you do, you can never efface yourself from the photographed scene.”
― F. David Peat, From Certainty to Uncertainty: The Story of Science and Ideas in the Twentieth Century

“Disease is a manifestation of human thought because it is ideas, worldviews, and beliefs that create the conditions in which a society can be riddled with disease, strife, and poverty, or can continue in health and harmony.”
― F. David Peat

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
― Albert Camus

“The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.”
― Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer