Stephen Nunn > Stephen's Quotes

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#1

“Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist; on an insignificant basis of reality the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations.”
― August Strindberg, A Dream Play

tags: preface

41 likes

#2

“Do not weep. Do not wax indignant. Understand.”
― Baruch Spinoza

201 likes

#3

“We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.”
― Ken Robinson

tags: creativity, education, fast-food

87 likes

#4

“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”
― William Butler Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

tags: silence

159 likes

#5

“it was the kind of moon
that I would want to
send back to my ancestors
and gift to my descendants

so they know that I too,
have been bruised...by beauty.”
― Sanober Khan, Turquoise Silence

tags: ancestors, beauty, bruised, bruises, descendants, indian-authors, moon, moonlight, poetry, poetry-quotes, poets

114 likes

#7

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
― Franz Kafka

tags: books, castle, self

4144 likes

#8

“It's easier to avoid the snares of love than to escape once you are in that net whose cords and knots are strong; but even so, enmeshed, entangled, you can still get out unless, poor fool, you stand in your own way.”
― Lucretius, The Way Things Are

49 likes

#9

“The planet is fine. The people are fucked.”
― George Carlin

tags: funny, humanity, humor

8864 likes

#10

“It’s not that we have to quit
this life one day, but it’s how
many things we have to quit
all at once: music, laughter,
the physics of falling leaves,
automobiles, holding hands,
the scent of rain, the concept
of subway trains... if only one
could leave this life slowly!”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

tags: automobiles, beauty, carpe-diem, dying, holding-hands, laughter, leaves, life, loss, music, rain, regret, sorrow, subway, trains

491 likes

#11

“All forms of madness, bizarre habits, awkwardness in society, general clumsiness, are justified in the person who creates good art.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

tags: art, artists, awkwardness, bizarre, clumsiness, good-art, literature, madness, roman-payne, strangeness, weird

446 likes

#12

“IN THE HANDS OF MAN

He who creates a poison, also has the cure.
He who creates a virus, also has the antidote.
He who creates chaos, also has the ability to create peace.
He who sparks hate, also has the ability to transform it to love.
He who creates misery, also has the ability to destroy it with kindness.
He who creates sadness, also has the ability to to covert it to happiness.
He who creates darkness, can also be awakened to produce illumination.
He who spreads fear, can also be shaken to spread comfort.
Any problems created by the left hand of man,
Can also be solved with the right,
For he who manifests anything,
Also has the ability to
Destroy it.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

tags: antidote, awaken, chaos, comfort, cure, darkness, destroy, evil, fear, fearfulness, good, hands, happiness, hate, human, human-nature, humanity, illumination, kindness, left, light, love, man, manifest, manifestation, mankind, misery, opposites, peace, poison, problems, protection, right, sadness, solace, suffering, transform, virus

140 likes

#13

“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!”
― Rudyard Kipling, If: A Father's Advice to His Son

tags: ataraxy, inspirational, life, manhood, moral-courage, perseverance

2213 likes

#14

“Mineral cactai,
quicksilver lizards in the adobe walls,
the bird that punctures space,
thirst, tedium, clouds of dust,
impalpable epiphanies of wind.
The pines taught me to talk to myself.
In that garden I learnedto send myself off.
Later there were no gardens. ”
― Octavio Paz, A Draft of Shadows and Other Poems

tags: mexico, octavio-paz, poetry

32 likes

#15

“We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever...and all the time it is carrying us about...It is the human nervous system itself.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger - Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati

tags: metaphysics, philosophy

143 likes

#16

“Up then, fair phoenix bride, frustrate the sun;
Thyself from thine affection
Takest warmth enough, and from thine eye
All lesser birds will take their jollity.
Up, up, fair bride, and call
Thy stars from out their several boxes, take
Thy rubies, pearls, and diamonds forth, and make
Thyself a constellation of them all;
And by their blazing signify
That a great princess falls, but doth not die.
Be thou a new star, that to us portends
Ends of much wonder; and be thou those ends.”
― John Donne, The Complete English Poems

tags: adornment, brides, brightness, happiness, imagery, jewels, joy, light, metaphors, phoenix, radiance, stars, sun, wedding

71 likes

#17

“I'm simply saying that there is a way to be sane. I'm saying that you can get rid of all this insanity created by the past in you. Just by being a simple witness of your thought processes.

It is simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts, passing before you. Just witnessing, not interfering not even judging, because the moment you judge you have lost the pure witness. The moment you say “this is good, this is bad,” you have already jumped onto the thought process.

It takes a little time to create a gap between the witness and the mind. Once the gap is there, you are in for a great surprise, that you are not the mind, that you are the witness, a watcher.

And this process of watching is the very alchemy of real religion. Because as you become more and more deeply rooted in witnessing, thoughts start disappearing. You are, but the mind is utterly empty.

That’s the moment of enlightenment. That is the moment that you become for the first time an unconditioned, sane, really free human being.”
― Osho

tags: enlightenment, meditation, zen

875 likes

#18

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
― anaïs nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974

tags: inspirational, journey, quest, seekers, travel

1894 likes

#19

“Where the Mystery is present, joy is infinite; where the Mystery has departed, efficacy is exhausted and the spirit disappears.”
― Ge Hong

7 likes

#20

“I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia”
― Ptolemy, Ptolemy's Almagest

tags: eternity, mortality, night-sky, sky, stars

252 likes

#21

“The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.”
― T. H. White

174 likes

#22

“We find that at present the human race is divided into one wise man, nine knaves, and ninety fools out of every hundred. That is, by an optimistic observer. The nine knaves assemble themselves under the banner of the most knavish among them, and become 'politicians'; the wise man stands out, because he knows himself to be hopelessly outnumbered, and devotes himself to poetry, mathematics, or philosophy; while the ninety fools plod off under the banners of the nine villains, according to fancy, into the labyrinths of chicanery, malice and warfare. It is pleasant to have command, observes Sancho Panza, even over a flock of sheep, and that is why the politicians raise their banners. It is, moreover, the same thing for the sheep whatever the banner. If it is democracy, then the nine knaves will become members of parliament; if fascism, they will become party leaders; if communism, commissars. Nothing will be different, except the name. The fools will be still fools, the knaves still leaders, the results still exploitation. As for the wise man, his lot will be much the same under any ideology. Under democracy he will be encouraged to starve to death in a garret, under fascism he will be put in a concentration camp, under communism he will be liquidated.”
― T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once & Future King

tags: giftedness, political-science, sad-but-true, sword-sentiments

121 likes

#23

“I am an anarchist, like any other sensible person.
~ Merlyn”
― T.H. White, The Book of Merlyn

54 likes

#24

“For a new year to bring you something new, make a move, like a butterfly tearing its cocoon! Make a move!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

tags: new-year

54 likes

#25

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

tags: lies, lying, trust

31592 likes

#26

“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…”
― Timothy Leary

1425 likes

#27

“I began to understand that suffering and disappointments and melancholy are there not to vex us or cheapen us or deprive us of our dignity but to mature and transfigure us.”
― Hermann Hesse, Peter Camenzind

tags: life, maturity, melancholy, suffering

325 likes

#28

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

tags: ataraxy, be-yourself, confidence, fitting-in, individuality, misattributed-dr-seuss, those-who-matter

130136 likes

#29

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
― Aldous Huxley

tags: introspection, solitude

2182 likes

#30

“The power of imagination makes us infinite.”
― John Muir

411 likes

#31

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
― Rachel Carson

tags: destruction, ecology, reality, universe, wonder

2609 likes

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