Nick > Nick's Quotes

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
― Franz Kafka

“Listen! Here’s all you need to know to become enlightened: Sit down, shut up, and ask yourself what’s true until you know. That’s it. That’s the whole deal; a complete teaching of enlightenment, a complete practice. If you ever have any questions or problems—no matter what the question or problem is—the answer is always exactly the same: Sit down, shut up, and ask yourself what’s true until you know. In other words, go jump off a cliff. Don’t go near the cliff and contemplate jumping off. Don’t read a book about jumping off. Don’t study the art and science of jumping off. Don’t join a support group for jumping off. Don’t write poems about jumping off. Don’t kiss the ass of someone else who jumped off. Just jump.”
― Jed McKenna, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing

“Before the soul can see, the Harmony within must be attained, and fleshly eyes be rendered blind to all illusion.”
― Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Voice of the Silence

“Doing as others told me, I was Blind.

Coming when others called me, I was Lost.

Then I left everyone, myself as well.

Then I found Everyone, Myself as well.”
― Rumi

“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep.”
― Rumi

“He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“I think that any artistic decision that is based on whether or not you are going to make money it is not really an artistic decision. It is a business decision. And there are a lot of things that I can do to earn a living and a lot of things that I have already done to earn a living which produce the amount of capital needed to do this project. I came here to spend money on an English orchestra and record my music, so I can take it home and I can listen to it. And... if somebody else likes that kind of stuff, I will make it available on a record so that they can hear it. That is my part of the public service of spending the money to make this event happen. No foundation grant, no government assistance, no corporation, no comittee. Just a crazy guy who spent the money to hire English musicians to do a concert at the Barbican and make an album for Barking Pumpkin Records.”
― Frank Zappa

“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”
― David Foster Wallace , This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.”
― David Foster Wallace

“Follow the wandering, the distraction, find out why the mind has wandered; pursue it, go into it fully. When the distraction is completely understood, then that particular distraction is gone. When another comes, pursue it also.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“Men who have lived significant lives are men who never waited: not for money, security, ease, or women. Feel what you want to give most as a gift, to your woman and to the world, and do what you can to give it today. Every moment waited is a moment wasted, and each wasted moment degrades your clarity of purpose.”
― David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire

“To program the calories you must consume and the number of hours you must sleep is a foolish way to handle life.”
― Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy

“How the human system is happening, in the same way the universe has happened. In the same way that the micro is happening, that is how the macro has happened. If you look at the micro and perceive it, you will also know existence.”
― Jaggi Vasudev, Of Mystics & Mistakes

“Our lives become beautiful not because we are perfect. Our lives become beautiful because we put our heart into what we are doing. It doesn't matter what we are doing. Whether we are sweeping the floor, or managing the country, or whatever we are doing. If we are putting our heart into what we are doing, it is beautiful to be doing that activity. Living in an atmosphere where people are passionate about what they are doing itself is highly enriching.”
― Jaggi Vasudev, Inner Management: In the Presence of the Master

“invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
don't swim in the same slough.
invent yourself and then reinvent yourself and
stay out of the clutches of mediocrity.

invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you.

reinvigorate yourself and
accept what is
but only on the terms that you have invented
and reinvented.

be self-taught.

and reinvent your life because you must;
it is your life and
its history
and the present
belong only to
you.”
― Charles Bukowski, The Pleasures of the Damned

“the way to create art is to burn and destroy
ordinary concepts and to substitute them
with new truths that run down from the top of the head
and out of the heart”
― Charles Bukowski

“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.”
― Rumi

“Reason is powerless in the expression of Love.”
― Rumi

“Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone's soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.”
― Rumi

“Is it really so that the one I love is everywhere?”
― Rumi

“When someone beats a rug,
the blows are not against the rug,
but against the dust in it.”
― Rumi Jalalu'l-Din

“Do not feel lonely, the entire universe is inside you.”
― Rumi

“My lips got lost on the way to the kiss -
that's how drunk I
was.”
― Rumi

“do it or don't do it but get on with it...”
― J. Krishnamurti, Beginnings of Learning

“Don't follow me, I'm lost.”
― UG Krishnamurti, Thought is Your Enemy: Mind-Shattering Conversations with the Man Called U.G.

“The body cannot be afraid of death. The movement that is created by society or culture is what does not want to come to an end. . . . What you are afraid of is not death. In fact, you don't want to be free from fear. . . . It is the fear that makes you believe that you are living and that you will be dead. What we do not want is the fear to come to an end. That is why we have invented all these new minds, new science, new talk, therapies, choiceless awareness and various other gimmicks. Fear is the very thing that you do not want to be free from. What you call “yourself” is fear. The “you” is born out of fear; it lives in fear, functions in fear and dies in fear.”
― U.G. Krishnamurti, No Way Out: Dialogues with Krishnamurti

“Brother, stand the pain.
Escape the poison of your impulses.
The sky will bow to your beauty, if you do.
Learn to light the candle. Rise with the sun.
Turn away from the cave of your sleeping.
That way a thorn expands to a rose.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“There's no one with intelligence in this town except that man over there playing with the children, the one riding the stick horse. He has keen, fiery insight and vast dignity like the night sky, but he conceals it in the madness of child's play.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi