Johanna > Johanna's Quotes

“Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available”
― Gregory Benford, Timescape

“under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being.”
― Robert Anton Wilson

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“I, myself, am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.”
― Augusten Burroughs

“In order to eat, you have to be hungry. In order to learn, you have to be ignorant. Ignorance is a condition of learning. Pain is a condition of health. Passion is a condition of thought. Death is a condition of life.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Leviathan

“The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The Golden Apple

“We have never sought power. We have sought to disperse power, to set men and women free. That really means: to help them to discover that they are free. Everybody's free. The slave is free. The ultimate weapon isn't this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences. 'Fear is failure.' 'The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.' "Thou hast no right but to do thy will.' The goose can break the bottle at any second. Socrates took the hemlock to prove it. Jesus went to the cross to prove it. It's in all history, all myth, all poetry. It's right out in the open all the time.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Leviathan

“The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.”
― T.S. Eliot

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“We're fascinated by the words--but where we meet is in the silence behind them.”
― ram dass

“The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.”
― ram dass

“I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion--and where it isn't, that's where my work lies.”
― ram dass

“The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.”
― ram dass

“In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.”
― ram dass

“As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.”
― ram dass

“Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.”
― Ram Dass

“Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.”
― ram dass

“What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.”
― Ram Dass

“Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.”
― ram dass