Timothy Ball > Recent Status Updates

"Schmaltz demonstrated that the modern deck of cards could be taken as a symbol of the Egyptian year incorporated in the Great Pyramid. According to Schmaltz the 52 cards represent the weeks, the 12 face cards the months, the 13 cards in a suit the lunations, the suits the seasons, the total face value of the cards (counting Jack 11, Queen 12, King 13) 364 days, plus Joker as the magic 1.234, total of 365.234 days."

"Christ knows the Kingdom of God which is the Kingdom of Life and Love on earth. It is here, right there in each flower, sparrow, tree and olive branch. His fellow men are not aware of God. They do not feel Life. They exchange money, they fornicate in a bad way, not knowing what love is. They pay heavy taxes and obey stupid, struttting, gulping, hideous emperors."

"The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more."

"Their view evidently was that genius was like offences—needs must that it come, but woe unto that man through whom it comes. A man’s business, they hold, is to think as his neighbours do, for Heaven help him if he thinks good what they count bad. And really it is hard to see how the Erewhonian theory differs from our own, for the word “idiot” only means a person who forms his opinions for himself."

As Scripture teaches, "You meant evil, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good."

I was still full of hope, and built golden castles for myself as soon as I was warmed with food and fire; but I do not believe that any man could long retain his reason in such solitude, unless he had the companionship of animals.

"The sphere of poetry does not lie outside the world, like some fantastic impossibility of a poet's imagination: it seeks to be the very opposite, the unvarnished expression of truth, and must for this very reason cast aside the false finery of that supposed reality of the cultured man."

"Making an injury visible and public is often the first step in remedying it, and political change often follows culture, as what was tolerated is seen to be intolerable, or what was overlooked becomes obvious." - Rebecca Solnit

"Did Plato have a battery? Did Mozart have 220 volts? In candlelight, Uncle, your heart opens up. And when you go outside you have the wind blowing from the steppes and the smell of wild herbs!"

"Incapable of the divine activity which alone can satisfy his soul, fallen man flings himself upon exterior things, not so much for their own sake as for the sake of the agitation which keeps his spirit pleasantly numb."

"True clairvoyance rests, not in your ability to see things beyond the range of human vision, but rather in your ability to understand that which you see."

"Awake from the sleep of condemnation and prove the principle of life. Stop not only your judgement of others but your condemnation of yourself."

"Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn't always so lucky. Less than a century ago men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them."

"Stop asking yourself whether or not you are worthy or unworthy to claim yourself to be that which you desire to be. You will be condemned by the world only as long as you condemn yourself."

"It all seemed so real that I could hardly imagine that it had ever occurred before; and yet each episode came, not as a fresh step in the logic of things, but as something expected. It is in such a wise that memory plays its pranks for good or ill; for pleasure or pain; for weal or woe. It is thus that life is bittersweet, and that which has been done becomes eternal."

"The Destiny of the Earth is written in the Sun and Moon, and not in the science of men."

"Somebody had to teach Jones to use his talent; somebody had to show him how to exploit it. That person was a fat, perspiring salesman in a pink-stripe shirt and yellow-lemon dacron trousers, driving a battered Buick. He was a sloppy, easy-going, vice-saturated creature, smelling of sweat and years of wandering travel. And he was a great, dreaming swindler."

Listening is one of the great active experiences in which we can easily learn to partake. It is one that we are quite naturally born to do, although unfortunately it is an ability that many of us lose as we grow older. Hearing is a passive experience in which sounds may or may not be received and perceived by the ear and then sent into the brain for stimulation. Listening is not passive. It is active.

"To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths,
being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow
growth. You think you are standing still like swamp water, but
slowly you flow into the sea that covers the earth's greatest deeps,
and is so vast that firm land seems only an island imbedded in the
womb of the immeasurable sea."

"Making something beautiful is difficult, but it is amazingly worthwhile. If you learn to make something in your life beautiful—even one thing—then you have established a relationship with beauty. That is an invitation with the divine. That is the reconnection with the immortality of childhood, and the true beauty and majesty of the Being you can no longer see."