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SeedNet

This is a collection of pithy one-liners (Seeds) which also circulate as taglines to e-mail messages. Some are of gnoxic origin, others gleaned from various sources. You could think of them as thought bites, like the sound bites used in some broadcast media. The difference is that here we aim to provide links to the context from which the utterance was abducted, or to the seed's home system, enabling curious readers to follow up on these leads. (Eventually we hope to have every seed thus linked, but this may take some time.)

This page is organized by subject, and the subject index below includes links to the SourceNet page. You can find all quotations from a specific author on this page by searching for his or her name. If the author has played a major role in gnoxic studies, clicking on any instance of his name here will take you to the SourceNet page (or in a few cases to a separate page devoted to that author). There is also an author index on the SourceNet page.

INDEX
Headings in italic link directly to SourceNet. Headings of SeedNet itself are Capitalized; other terms link to those headings. You might also get interesting results by searching this file for one of these words (or its root, e.g. ‘creat’ for ‘creation’).

Words and concepts like those listed above occupy specific (but overlapping and fuzzily bounded) niches in subjective meaning space, because the subject's usage of them to make sense of experience has established a network of relationships among them. These relationships, shaped partly by accidents of cultural and personal history, map the words in varying ways onto a meaning space informed by human embodiment. So ‘mind’ is sometimes a good word for ‘heart’ and ‘heart’ for ‘mind’, and sometimes the occasion calls for a distinction between them.

In dialogue, we may converge on common meanings by exploring divergent meanings of common terms, or by exploring converging meanings of diverse terms. This collection is intended to serve such dialogue. Any comments or questions from readers are welcome, either privately (gnox -at- xplornet -dot- com) or on the gnoxic blog.

• In the beginning is the .
  — gnox

• Of making many books there is no end.
  — Ecclesiastes 12:12

• The disciples asked Jesus: Tell us about our end. What will it be? Jesus replied: Have you found the Beginning so that you now seek the end? The place of the Beginning will be the place of the end. Blessed is anyone who will stand up in the Beginning and thereby know the end and never die.
  — Gospel of Thomas 18 (Davies)

• The philosopher … is a perpetual beginner, which means that he takes for granted nothing that men, learned or otherwise, believe they know.
  — Merleau-Ponty (1945, xv)

• Knowledge is a single point, but the ignorant have multiplied it.
  — hadíth of Imám ‘Alí

• There is a well-known tradition in Islam … that the essence of all the Scriptures of past Dispensations is to be found in the Qur'án, that the Qur'án itself is contained in the opening chapter, that this chapter is embodied in the first verse, that the first verse in its entirety is included in the first letter (B), and that all that is within this letter is condensed in the dot beneath it [in Arabic script].
  — Taherzadeh, The Revelation of Bahá'u'lláh Vol. I, 34

• To read one verse, or even one word, in a spirit of joy and radiance, is preferable to the perusal of many Books.
  — Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas, Answer to Question 68

• Stop before stemming to know simplicity. Break into branches to reveal the implications.
  — gnox (after Lao Tzu)

• Any analytical approach to understanding simplicity always turns out to be very complex.
  — Howard Pattee (1973, 73)

• The Tao of heaven is pointed but does no harm.
  — Tao Te Ching 81 (Feng/English)

• The Buddha said many times, ‘My teaching is like a finger pointing to the moon. Do not mistake the finger for the moon.’
  — Thich Nhat Hanh (1998, 17)

• What's the point of all this? Perhaps all we can do is circle round it, the ‘point’ being where we stop circling. What is a period? A full stop or a space of time? It comes from the Greek peri hodos, which means ‘road around.’
  — gnox

• The gods did this, and spun the destruction of peoples, for the sake of the singing of men hereafter.
  — Odyssey VIII 579-80

• The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin.
  — Finnegans Wake, 452

• We shall not cease from exploration
  And at the end of all our exploring
  Will be to arrive where we started
  And know the place for the first time.
  
  — T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’

• Likewise continue thou to ascend through one Revelation after another, knowing that thy progress in the Knowledge of God shall never come to an end, even as it can have no beginning.
  — The Báb

• The disciples said to Jesus, ‘Tell us what the kingdom of Heaven is like.’ He said to them, ‘It is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds. But when it falls on tilled soil, it produces a great plant and becomes a shelter for birds of the sky.’
  — Gospel of Thomas 20 (Lambdin; cf. Luke 13:18-19)

• Those with sense plant seeds;
  The fruits grow from the ground.
  Since there is no seed without sense,
  There is no nature, no life.
  
  — Grand Master Hung-jen, the Fifth Patriarch, in the Sutra of Hui-neng (Cleary 1998, 11)

• The mind ground contains the seeds:
  With universal rain, all of them sprout.
  When you've suddenly realized the blossoming heart,
  The fruit of enlightenment will naturally mature.
  
  — Grand Master Hui-neng, the Sixth Patriarch, in the Sutra of Hui-neng (Cleary 1998, 75)

• In the soil of whose heart will these holy seeds germinate?
  — Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán ¶65

• By their fruits ye shall know them.
  — Matthew 7:20

• Him I call indeed a Brahmana who does not cling to pleasures, like water on a lotus leaf, like a mustard seed on the point of a needle.

  Him I call indeed a Brahmana from whom anger and hatred, pride and envy have dropt like a mustard seed from the point of a needle.

  — Dhammapada 26:19,25 (tr. Müller, #401, 407)

• SourceNet on language

• In the beginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance.
  — Finnegans Wake, 378

• All messages are coded.
  — G. Bateson (1979, 235)

• The Path is fundamentally without words. We use words to reveal the Path.
  — Blue Cliff Record 25 (Cleary and Cleary 1977, 166)

• No messenger is ever sent save with the tongue of his own people.
  — Qur'án 14:4 (Cragg 1994, 55)

• Divine revelation is always human at the point of delivery.
  — Anthony Freeman (2001, 15)

• For anything to be significant simply means that it can serve as a sign which becomes meaningful in the context of a message. Decoding is always recoding, the recreation of a message in a different medium.
  — gnox

• Language is a very difficult thing to put into words.
  — Voltaire

• The power of language lies not in words but in the mind.
  — Turner (1991, 209)

• Language is inseparable from conceptual thought; conceptual thought in turn is inseparable from what it means to have a human body and lead a human life.
  — Turner (1991, 17)

• The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
  — Tao Te Ching 1 (Feng/English)

• Once the whole is divided, the parts need names. There are already enough names. One must know when to stop.
  — Tao Te Ching 32 (Feng/English)

• Wishing to entice the blind,
  The Buddha playfully let words escape his golden mouth;
  Heaven and earth are ever since filled with entangling briars.
  — Dai-o Kokushi (Suzuki 1935, 146)

• oh bless the continuous stutter
  of the word being made into flesh.
  — Leonard Cohen, ‘The Window’ (1993, 299)

• This sentence to be reverbed.
  — gnox

• Organisms are self-reading texts.
  — Kalevi Kull (1998)

• The word must be the thing it represents; otherwise, it is a symbol.
  — Wallace Stevens (1957, 168)

• We immerse ourselves in the cloud of context so that the text may crystallize around us, falling as words into knowledge. Knowledge rises again into context until the word-seed condenses it once again as information.
  — gnox

• The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
  — Wittgenstein (Tractatus 5.6)

• Sure, treasures, a letterman does be often thought reading ye between lines that do have no sense at all. I sign myself.
  — Finnegans Wake, 454

• I am simultaneously writing and being written.
  — Hofstadter (1985, 11)

• If a man follows the mind given him and makes it his teacher, then who can be without a teacher?
  — Chuang Tzu (Watson 1968, 38)

• Confucius said, When it comes to the practice of humanity one should not defer even to his teacher.
  — Analects 15:35 (Chan 1963)

• They were offered the choice of becoming Kings or the couriers of kings. They way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other —since there are no kings—messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to their miserable lives but they dare not because of their oaths of service.
  — Kafka (1961, 175)

• God, O Arjuna, dwells in the heart of every being and to His delusive mystery whirls them all, as the clay on the potter's wheel.
  — Bhagavad-Gita 18:61 (Gandhi 1926)

• He prophets most who bilks the best.
  — Finnegans Wake, 305

• Say what you have to say, not what you ought.
  — Thoreau, Walden, chp. 18

• Walt Whitman is a space the Milky Way fashioned to feel its own grandeur.
  — Swimme & Berry (1992, 40)

• Be! Verb umprincipiant through the trancitive spaces!
  — Finnegans Wake, 594

• There's an old proverb that says just about anything you need to say.
  — anon

• But the world, mind, is, was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever, man, on all matters that fall under the ban of our infrarational senses …
  — Finnegans Wake, 19

• So why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own?
  — Finnegans Wake, 115

• The Creator is reality personified, the one actor behind the whole scene.
  — gnox

• Had there been gods in heaven and earth other than The God, both would surely have gone to ruin. So glory to God, Lord of the Throne, beyond what they describe.
  — Qur'án 21:22 (Cleary)

• You have estranged yourself from the Creator, of whom you have sprung: you have lost your reason, you have brought death.
  All doctrines and all teachings are sprung from Him, from Him they grow …
  If you place the Guru at a distance from you, then it is but the distance that you honour:
  If indeed the Master be far away, then who is it else that is creating this world?
  — Kabir III.63 (Tagore 1915)

• All things proceed from God and unto Him they return. He is the source of all things and in Him all things are ended.
  — Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas ¶144

• Everything that is hath come to be through His irresistible decree.
  — Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas ¶7

• How … can we ever expect to be able to predict what the conduct would be, even of any omniscient being governing no more than one poor solar system for only a million years or so? How much less if, being also omnipotent, he be thereby freed from all experience, all desire, all intention! Since God, in His essential character of Ens necessarium, is a disembodied spirit, and since there is strong reason to hold that what we call consciousness is either merely the general sensation of the brain or some part of it, or at all events some visceral or bodily sensation, God probably has no consciousness.
  — Peirce (EP2:446)

• No thing have I perceived, except that I perceived God within it, God before it, or God after it.
  — hadíth of Imám ‘Alí

• He who has known himself has known his Lord.
  — hadíth of Imám ‘Alí

• Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue.
  — Meister Eckhart (Huxley 1945, 125)

• Every thing that lives is Holy.
  — Blake

• You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair.
  — Deshimaru

• If a bird calls in the forest, does anybody hear?
  — gnox

• The messages cease to be messages when nobody can read them.
  — G. Bateson

• O ESSENCE OF NEGLIGENCE!
  Myriads of mystic tongues find utterance in one speech, and myriads of hidden mysteries are revealed in a single melody; yet, alas, there is no ear to hear, nor heart to understand.
  — Bahá'u'lláh, The Hidden Words (Persian) 16

• The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it.
  — Kabir I.83 (Tagore 1915)

• All things come out of an unknown abyss of mystery, and through every one of them we can have a peep into the abyss.
  — D.T. Suzuki (1956, 287)

• How resplendent the luminaries of knowledge that shine in an atom, and how vast the oceans of wisdom that surge within a drop!
  — Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán ¶107

• Just as a reservoir is of little use when the whole countryside is flooded, scriptures are of little use to the illumined man or woman, who sees the Lord everywhere.
  — Bhagavad-Gita 2:46 (Easwaran)

• Pride not yourselves on much reading of the verses or on a multitude of pious acts by night and day; for were a man to read a single verse with joy and radiance it would be better for him than to read with lassitude all the Holy Books of God.
  — Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas ¶149

• The adventure of the universe depends upon our capacity to listen.
  — Swimme & Berry (1992, 44)

• When we hear a Dharma talk or study a sutra, our only job is to remain open. Usually when we hear or read something new, we just compare it to our own ideas. If it is the same, we accept it and say it is correct. If it is not, we say it is incorrect. In either case, we learn nothing. If we read or listen with an open mind and an open heart, the rain of the Dharma will penetrate the soil of our consciousness.
  — Thich Nhat Hanh (1998, 12)

• Unroll it, and it reaches in all directions. Roll it up, and it withdraws and lies hidden in minuteness. ‘Its meaning and interest are inexhaustible.’
  — Chu Hsi's remark on The Doctrine of the Mean (Chan 1963, 97)

• Just as the actual meaning of a script is a performance, the actual meaning of scripture is what you mean to do with your life.
  — gnox

• The universe is the primary revelation of the divine, the primary scripture, the primary locus of divine-human communion.
  — Thomas Berry

• A miracle is a materialist's idea of how to escape from materialism.
  — G. Bateson

• How do we know that what we call divine is not human, and what we call human is not divine?
  — Chuang-tzu 6 (Cleary)

• The universe is the only text without a context.
  — Thomas Berry

• The universe is sacred. You cannot improve it.
  — Tao Te Ching 29 (Feng/English)

• Man does not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
  — Ted Perry (1971, loosely based on an 1854 speech by Chief Seattle; Seed et al. 1988, 71)

• We are involved with the world and with others in an inextricable tangle.
  — Merleau-Ponty (1945, 528)

• Man is but a network of relationships, and these alone matter to him.
  — Saint-Exupéry, quoted in Merleau-Ponty (1945, 530)

• The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
  — Blake

• Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence and are nothing in themselves.
  — Nagarjuna

• Every neuron in the net is unique and redundant.
  — gnox

• Everything is connected, but some things are more connected than others.
  — Herbert Simon (Pattee 1973, 23)

• You have to assume A in order to perceive B.
  You have to believe B in order to recognize A.
  The number of elements in this loop, and the order of operations, are indeterminate.
  The loop is a self-enclosing net.
  The net is stretched to catch the void.
  Whatever is caught becomes the net.
  The net is consistency itself.
  As Gödel showed, its consistency cannot be demonstrated within the net.
  — gnox

• Of course, this account is only schematic. In practice the various inquiries proceed in mutual interdependence. Thus, to the extent that we have some ideas about universal grammar, this will influence the way we assign structures to the expressions that constitute the evidence for research into descriptive grammar and it will influence the form of these descriptive grammars.
  — Chomsky (1988, 62)

• There are no answers, only cross-references.
  — Norbert Weiner

• You can never do just one thing.
  — Garrett Hardin

• Heaven's net is wide.
  — Tao Te Ching

1. biology

• Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.
  — Gleick (1987, 299)

• Look, look, the dusk is growing! My branches lofty are taking root.
  — Finnegans Wake, 213

• It is the business of the living organism to organize, for where there is life there is not only hope, as the proverb says, but also fears, guesses, expectations which sort and model the incoming messages, testing and transforming and testing again.
  — Gombrich (2002, 251)

• Wherever there is life, there is twist and mess.
  — Annie Dillard (1974)

• … it's the muddest thick that ever was heard dump since Eggsmather got smothered in the plap of the pfan.
  — Finnegans Wake, 296

• Where there are humans, you'll find flies and Buddhas.
  — Issa

• We are alive because of this, that we have no rest.
  — Abu-Talib Kalim

• The name of the bow is life, but its work is death.
  — Heraclitus, punning on the Greek words bios (bow) and bios (life).

• The birth and death of the leaves are the rapid whirls of the eddy whose wider circles move slowly among the stars.
  — Tagore

• Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf.
  — Annie Dillard (1974, 16)

• The stiff and unbending is the disciple of death. The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.
  — Tao Te Ching 76 (Feng/English)

• Heaven and earth persist because they do not give themselves life.
  — Tao Te Ching

• Life as God and music and carbon and energy is a whirling nexus of growing, fusing, and dying beings. It is matter gone wild, capable of choosing its own direction in order to indefinitely forestall the inevitable moment of thermodynamic equilibrium—death. Life is also a question the universe poses to itself in the form of a human being.
  — Margulis and Sagan (1995, 55)
  
  
  

  2. biography

• It's like life—a game whose purpose is to discover the rules, which rules are always changing and always undiscoverable.
  — G. Bateson (1972, 19-20)

• Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
  — Samuel Butler, Note-Books

• Life teaches us who we are.
  — Salman Rushdie (quoted in Ledoux 2002)

• My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot.
  — Ashleigh Brilliant

• All the charictures in the drame!
  — Finnegans Wake, 302

• How bootifull and how truetowife of her, when strengly forebidden, to steal our historic presents from the past postpropheticals so as to will make us all lordy heirs and ladymaidesses of a pretty nice kettle of fruit. She is livving in our midst of debt and laffing through all plores for us (her birth is uncontrollable), with a naperon for her mask and her sabboes kickin arias (so sair! so solly!) if yous ask me and I saack you. Hou! Hou! Gricks may rise and Troysirs fall (there being two sights for ever a picture) for in the byways of high improvidence that's what makes lifework leaving and the world's a cell for citters to cit in.
  — Finnegans Wake, 11-12

• Who knows whether the present speaker is awake or dreaming?
  — Chuang-tzu 6 (Cleary)

• If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.
  — William James, ‘Is Life Worth Living?’ (The Will to Believe and other Essays)

• From a real antagonist boundless courage flows into you.
  — Kafka (1936, 166)

• Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.
  — M. Scott Peck

• The unexamined life is not worth living.
  — Socrates

• Life is the sort of guest you don't meet twice.
  — Kabir

• Is there life before death?
  — Belfast graffito

• If we don't survive, we don't do anything else.
  — John Sinclair

• I've got better things to do than survive.
  — ani difranco

• Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
  — J. Lennon

• Life is a horizontal fall.
  — Jean Cocteau

• Awake at the cruxroads, asleep on the way.
  — gnox

• Release me from my unfulfilled past clinging to me from behind making death difficult.
  — Tagore

• For a burning would is come to dance inane.
  — Finnegans Wake, 250

• It takes a long time to learn that life is short.
  — gnox

• Today is the last day of the past of your life.
  — anon

• Life is like an analogy.
  — anon

• We're all found of our anmal matter.
  — Finnegans Wake, 294

• Ye are all created out of water, and unto dust shall ye return.
  — Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas ¶148

• Body structure is always involved in some processes, else it disintegrates. It is a structure from process, for further process, and only so.
  — Gendlin (1998, I)

• The only subject ultimately capable of mystical transfiguration is the whole group of mankind forming a single body and a single soul in charity.
  — Teilhard de Chardin

• Be strong, and enter into your own body: for there your foothold is firm. Consider it well, O my heart! go not elsewhere.
  Kabir says: ‘Put all imaginations away, and stand fast in that which you are.’
  — Kabir II.22, (Tagore 1915)

• Shatter your ideals on the rock of truth.
  — Hazrat Pir O Murshid Inayat Khan

• Souls, personalities, and egos are masks, spectres, concealing our unity as body. For it is as one biological species that mankind is one … so that to become conscious of ourselves as body is to become conscious of mankind as one.
  — N.O. Brown (1966, 82)

• When the mind is at its most concentrated, it may have attempted to eliminate present distractions, but it is fully engaged with the body as mapped in the mind. The body as mapped in the mind is the basis of many sorts of knowledge, including abstract knowledge, and routinely suffuses thought, of all varieties.

  Thought is not an out-of-body experience.

  — Turner (1991, 41, 43)

• As the seed is within the banyan tree, and within the seed are the flowers, the fruits, and the shade:
  So the germ is within the body, and within that germ is the body again.
  The fire, the air, the water, the earth, and the aether; you cannot have these outside of Him.
  O Kazi, O Pundit, consider it well: what is there that is not in the soul?
  The water-pitcher is placed upon water, it has water within and without.
  It should not be given a name, lest it call forth the error of dualism.
  Kabir says: ‘Listen to the Word, the Truth, which is your essence. He speaks the Word to Himself; and He Himself is the Creator.’
  
  — Kabir I.98 (Tagore 1915)

• Man has no Body distinct from his Soul.
  — Blake

• But let us assume that it is possible to remove the central nervous system surgically from the body. Let us label the deprived shell without its brain a ‘corpse-body’. Our default concept of the body contains much that belongs not to the corpse-body but rather to the central nervous system removed from it, or more accurately to the functioning of the central nervous system when properly embodied. By attributing to the corpse-body many things that do not belong to it, we can maintain a split between our concept of the mind and our concept of the body. In this way, we conceive of the body as estranged from the mind.
  — Turner (1991, 36)

• Where the body is, there the eagles will be gathered together.
  — Luke 17:37 (RSV)

• Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.
  — Luke 17:37 (New English Bible)

• Every atom in this body existed before organic life emerged 4000 million years ago.
  — John Seed (1988, 36)

• All things arise from Tao.
  They are nourished by Virtue.
  They are formed from matter.
  They are shaped by environment.
  Thus the ten thousand things all respect Tao and honor Virtue.
  Respect of Tao and honor of Virtue are not demanded,
  But they are in the nature of things.
  — Tao Te Ching 51 (Feng/English)

• The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong.
  — Thomas Berry (1988, 81)

• Wild nature is inextricably in the weave of self and culture.… The dialogue to open next would be among all beings, toward a rhetoric of ecological relationships.
  — Gary Snyder (1990, 68)

• Man, insofar as he acts on nature to change it, changes his own nature.
  — Hegel

• Buddhahood is actualized within essential nature; do not seek it outside the body. If your own nature is confused, you are an ordinary person; if your own nature is awakened, you are a buddha.
  — Sutra of Hui-neng (Cleary 1998, 3)

• The universe is an outburst of ruthless joy, making and unmaking heaven and earth just for the hell of it.
  — gnox

• We are the rocks dancing.… It is they that are the immortal part of us.
  — John Seed (1988, 36)

• What the world needs now is a sense of humus.
  — David Dufty

• Everything is actually everything else, recycled.
  — anon

• One cannot step twice into the same river.
  — Heraclitus

• Into the same rivers we step and we do not step.
  — Heraclitus

• Lovely snowflakes, they fall nowhere else!
  — anon

• This ourth of years is not save brickdust and being humus the same roturns.
  — Finnegans Wake, 18

• For we are fed of its forest, clad in its wood, burqued by its bark and our lecture is its leave.
  — Finnegans Wake, 503

• We must recognize that the only effective program available as our primary guide toward a viable human mode of being is the program offered by the Earth itself.
  — Thomas Berry (1999, 71)

• The Earth belongs not to us, we belong to the Earth.
  — Black Elk

• This is the Day whereon the earth shall tell out her tidings.
  — Bahá'u'lláh (Gleanings XVII)

• The earth is not a building but a body.
  — Wallace Stevens

• We have committed ecocide in order to learn that we could do it. So what's the next lesson?
  — gnox

• If we can see (as we once saw very well) that our conversation with the planet is reciprocal and mutually creative, then we cannot help but walk carefully in that field of meaning.
  — David Suzuki 1997, 206

• The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.
  — Thomas Berry (1999, 3)

• [SourceNet link]
  

• To create a little flower is the labour of ages.
  — Blake

• Evolution is the author of its spontaneous creations.
  — Deacon 1997, 458

• Everything is what it is because it got that way.
  — D'Arcy Thompson

• The universe is populated by stable things.
  — Richard Dawkins

• All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.
  — Dawkins

• Evolution is an irreversible process, a process of increasing diversification and distribution. Only in this sense does evolution exhibit a consistent direction. Like entropy, it is a process of spreading out to whatever possibilities are unfilled and within reach of a little more variation.
  — Deacon 1997, 29

• Evolution is chaos with feedback.
  — Joseph Ford

• Biologists as well as philosophers have suggested that the universe, and the living forms it contains, are based on chance, but not on accident. To put it another way, forces of chance and of antichance coexist in a complementary relationship. The random element is called entropy, the agent of chaos, which tends to mix up the unmixed, to destroy meaning. The nonrandom element is information, which exploits the uncertainty inherent in the entropy principle to generate new structures, to inform the world in novel ways.
  — Campbell, Grammatical Man, 11

• Force is in the long run dissipative; chance is in the long run concentrative. The dissipation of energy by the regular laws of nature is by these very laws accompanied by circumstances more and more favorable to its reconcentration by chance. There must therefore be a point at which the two tendencies are balanced and that is no doubt the actual condition of the whole universe at the present time.
  — Peirce (EP1:221)

• Wherever chance-spontaneity is found, there in the same proportion feeling exists. In fact, chance is but the outward aspect of that which within itself is feeling.
  — Peirce (EP1:348)

• Without the random, there can be no new thing.
  — G. Bateson

• Innovation is hard to schedule.
  — Dan Fylstra

• If one does not expect the unexpected one will not find it out, since it is not to be searched out, and is difficult to compass.
  — Heraclitus (Kirk and Raven 1957, 195)

• One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
  — Gide

• Two dangers never cease threatening the world: order and disorder.
  — Valéry, ‘Crisis of the Mind’ (1919)

• [SourceNet link]

• If you use a word to talk about something you are conscious of, then what word do you use to talk about your consciousness of it?
  — gnox

• Strictly speaking, every word in the book should be in quotation marks …
  — G. Bateson (1979, 108)

• The conscious aspect of any thought is always embedded in a much larger and dominant unconscious aspect, upon which it depends for its existence and its meaning. Conscious aspects of thought are simple, relative to the complexity and intricacy of unconscious aspects.
  — Turner (1991, 39)

• Most of us are in the habit of thinking that consciousness and psychic life are the same thing and otherwise greatly to overrate the functions of consciousness.
  — Peirce (EP2:447)

• You can't have your use and mention it too.
  — Hofstadter (1985, 9)

• You can't edit your script and perform it at the same time.
  — gnox

• How can you think and hit at the same time?
  — Yogi Berra

• An unconscious agent is an effective agent.
  — Cronenberg's Clark-Nova

• The heart has its reasons of which the reason knows nothing.
  — Pascal

• Sometimes I am, sometimes I think.
  — Paul Valéry

• Consciousness is the means by which choices can be laid down as habits and routines raised up as choices.
  — gnox

• Consciousness is a dis-ease of the mind. It rides upon the unconscious like foam upon the waves, like words upon meaning.
  — gnox

• Let the machine do the dirty work.
  — anon

• Conscience is the ultimate and intimate guide to right and wrong. The word is derived from Latin con (together) and scire (to know).
  — gnox

• We must be the change we wish to see in the world.
  — Gandhi

• If intuition is an inner voice—how do I know how I am to obey it? And how do I know that it doesn't mislead me? For if it can guide me right, it can also guide me wrong.
  — Wittgenstein (PI I.213)

• You can blow out a candle, but you can't blow out a fire.
  — Peter Gabriel

• ‘The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence.
  — Thich Nhat Hanh (1995, 20)

• The sage has no heart of his own. He uses the heart of the people as his heart.
  — Tao Te Ching 49 (Waley)

• Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
  — Annie Dillard (1974, 82)

• If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.
  — Shunryu Suzuki (1970, 21)

• Right mindfulness accepts everything without judging or reacting. It is inclusive and loving. The Sanskrit word for mindfulness, smriti, means ‘remember.’ Mindfulness is remembering to come back to the present moment. The character the Chinese use for ‘mindfulness’ has two parts: the upper part means ‘now,’ and the lower part means ‘mind’ or ‘heart."
  — Thich Nhat Hanh (1998, 64)

• Mindfulness is the substance of a Buddha.
  — Thich Nhat Hanh (1995, 15)

• Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind inwards to include the whole communication system within the body—the autonomic, the habitual, and the vast range of unconscious process. What I am saying expands mind outwards. And both of these changes reduce the scope of the conscious self. A certain humility becomes appropriate, tempered by the dignity or joy of being part of something much bigger. A part—if you will—of God.

  If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks and conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.

  If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of overpopulation and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite.

  — G. Bateson (1972, 461)

• Phenomena are preceded by the heart, ruled by the heart, made of the heart. If you speak or act with a corrupted heart, then suffering follows you—as the wheel of the cart, the track of the ox that pulls it.

  Phenomena are preceded by the heart, ruled by the heart, made of the heart. If you speak or act with a calm, bright heart, then happiness follows you, like a shadow that never leaves.

  — Dhammapada 1.1-2, tr. Thanissaro Bhikkhu

• The way out of your suffering depends on how you look into it.
  — Thich Nhat Hanh (1998, 129)

• Knowing Buddha means nothing else than knowing sentient beings, for the latter ignore that they are potential Buddhas, whereas a Buddha sees no difference between himself and other beings. When sentient beings realize the Essence of Mind, they are Buddhas. If a Buddha is under delusion in his Essence of Mind, he is then an ordinary being.
  — Sutra of Hui-neng (Price and Wong 1969, 109)

• If you want to see buddha, just know ordinary beings. It is just because of the ordinary beings that you lose sight of buddha; it is not buddha that loses sight of ordinary beings. If your own nature is enlightened, ordinary being is buddhahood; if your own nature is confused, buddhahood is ordinary being.
  — Sutra of Hui-neng (Cleary 1998, 78)

• Can machines think? This is like asking whether submarines can swim.
  — anon

• SourceNet link
  

• All memories are coded.
  — gnox

• Memories are records of how we have experienced events, not replicas of the events themselves. Experiences are encoded by brain networks whose connections have already been shaped by previous encounters with the world. This preexisting knowledge powerfully influences how we encode and store new memories, thus contributing to the nature, texture, and quality of what we will recall of the moment.
  — Schacter 1996, 6

• What we recall is not what we actually experienced, but rather a reconstruction of what we experienced that is consistent with our current goals and our knowledge of the world.… What we call recollection can never be more than the most plausible story we come up with (or, perhaps, only a story which is plausible enough) within the context of the constraints imposed by biology and history.
  — Westbury and Dennett, in Shacter and Scarry 2000, 19

• In all ages we look down the well of history and see our own reflection.
  — Anthony Freeman

• I can't forget … but I don't remember what.
  — L. Cohen

• The mar of murmury mermers to the mind's ear, uncharted rock, evasive weed.… The charges are, you will remember, the chances are, you won't;
  — Finnegans Wake, 254

• What has gone? How it ends?
  Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today's truth, tomorrow's trend.
       Forget, remember!
  — Finnegans Wake, 614

• Something forgets us perfectly.
  — Leonard Cohen

• SourceNet: model
  

• Reality is not fixed because it is unbroken.
  — gnox

• If it works, don't fix it.
  — Sam Rayburn

• Reality works, and its work appears as the play of illusion. The illusion we can't see through is the one we call reality.
  — gnox

• Is this really happening?
  
  

• The perception of reality is best understood as a constructive process by which the brain builds useful models of the world.
  — Restak, The Brain, 114

• Whatever we call reality, it is revealed to us only through the active construction in which we participate.
  — Prigogine and Stengers (1984, 293)

• … a symbol's identity lies precisely in its ways of being connected (via potential triggering links) to other symbols. The network by which symbols can potentially trigger each other constitutes the brain's working model of the real universe, as well as of the alternate universes which it considers (and which are every bit as important for the individual's survival in the real world as the real world is).
  — Hofstadter (1980, 360)

• Our vision of the general nature of things is our guide for the interpretation of all future experience.
  — Polanyi (1962, 135)

• What if there were no hypothetical situations?
  — gnox

• They say, they say in effect, they really say.
  — Finnegans Wake, 597

• The map is not the territory.
  — Alfred Korzybski

• The map doesn't even resemble the territory, nor does it represent the moves we make in order to navigate the world. The map just prompts us to fit the move to the situation; and this fitness is what we call truth.
  — gnox

• The actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any description.
  — Peirce (EP1:227; CP 3.363)

• Rely on the truth, not on personality.
  — Mahaparinirvana-sutra

• There is no god higher than truth.
  — Gandhi

• Be it life or death, we crave only reality.
  — Thoreau, Walden, chp. 2

• If you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water.
  — Bulgarian proverb

• Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.
  — Wallace Stevens

• The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
  — Niels Bohr

• She'll confess it by her figure and she'll deny it to your face.
  — Finnegans Wake, 271

• Lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.
  — Hazlitt

• Truth is a pathless land.
  — Krishnamurti

• No generalization is wholly true, not even this one.
  — Oliver Wendell Holmes

• SourceNet link
  

• Learning is a natural process of pursuing personally meaningful goals, and it is active, volitional, and internally mediated; it is a process of discovering and constructing meaning from information and experience, filtered through the learner's unique perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.
  — American Psychological Association, 1993 (in McCombs and Whisler 1997, 5)

• If we want to learn anything, we mustn't try to learn everything.
  — Weinberg

• It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.
  — Thoreau, Walden, chp. 1

• Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.
  — Thessalonians 5:21, KJV (note that prove here has its original sense of test)

• Take what you can use and let the rest go by.
  — Kesey

• Lessons too complex to grasp in a single occurrence spiral past again and again, small examples gradually revealing greater and greater implications.
  — M.C. Bateson (1994, 30)

• Those who learn nothing from history are doomed to repeat it.
  — Santayana

• The challenge of the next millennium: Can those who live differently live together?
  — Jonathan Sachs

• Learning the contexts of life is a matter that has to be discussed, not internally, but as a matter of the external relationship between two creatures. And relationship is always a product of double description. … It is correct (and a great improvement) to begin to think of the two parties to the interaction as two eyes, each giving a monocular view of what goes on and, together, giving a binocular view in depth. This double view is the relationship.
  — G. Bateson (1979, 147)

• We have to learn what we can, but remain mindful that our knowledge not close the circle, closing out the void, so that we forget that what we do not know remains boundless, without limit or bottom, and that what we know may have to share the quality of being known with what denies it. What is seen with one eye has no depth.
  — Ursula Le Guin, Always Coming Home, 29

• It's strange the way circles hook up with themselves.
  — Bob Dylan (2004, 288)

• If you don't argue with me, I don't know what I think.
  — Alan Watts "On the Nature of Consciousness"

• Truth is the child of argument, not of fond affinity.
  — Gaston Bachelard

• Merely to remember something is meaningless unless the remembered image is combined with a moment in the present affording a view of the same object or objects. Like our eyes, our memories must see double; these two images then converge in our minds into a single heightened reality.
  — Roger Shattuck, quoted in Schacter 1996, 28

• To become open to multiple layers of vision is to be both practical and empathic, to practice the presence of God or gods and to practice wilderness. Learning the paths of human culture, we are attentive as well to the undomesticated outdoors and the essential wildness spinning on in subatomic spaces, forever generating new patterns.

  … the rise of fundamentalism within any tradition is always a symptom of the unwillingness to try to sustain joint performances across disparate codes—or, to put it differently, to live in ambiguity, a life that requires constant learning.

  — M.C. Bateson (1994, 12-13)

• Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
  — Oscar Wilde

• Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.
  — Einstein

• The Eye sees more than the Heart knows.
  — Blake

• SourceNet link
  

• Science is the systematic public embodiment of the learning process.
  — gnox

• A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
  — George Wald

• Science probes; it does not prove.
  — G. Bateson

• What is now proved was once only imagined.
  — Blake, Proverbs of Hell (Erdman 1965, 36); cf. Peirce, EP2:443

• Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature's imagination is richer than ours.
  — Freeman Dyson, ‘The Scientist as Rebel’, in Cornwell (ed.), Nature's Imagination

• The process of natural design, it seems, will routinely outrun the imaginings of human theorists.
  — Clark 1997, 97

• We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.
  — Marshall McLuhan

• The simple fact is that no measurement, no experiment or observation is possible without a relevant theoretical framework.
  — D.S. Kothari, cited in Prigogine and Stengers (1984, 293)

• That theory is worthless. It isn't even wrong!
  — Wolfgang Pauli

• Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
  — Einstein

• … the world is richer than it is possible to express in any single language. Music is not exhausted by its successive stylization from Bach to Schoenberg. Similarly, we cannot condense into a single description the various aspects of our experience. We must call upon numerous descriptions, irreducible one to the other, but connected to each other by precise rules of translation (technically called transformations).
  — Prigogine, From Being to Becoming, 51

• Two diverse descriptions are always better than one.
  — G. Bateson (1979, 157)

• Science is not foundationalist or purely objective. Such notions as ‘value-free science,’ pure observations, and conclusive falsifications of theories should be rejected as myths of the past. Instead, there is an important element of holism in scientific practice: scientific theories are in many respects like webs on which the world impinges only from the outside… .
  — Clayton 1997, 101-102

• Science is necessarily a domain of socially accepted operational statements validated by a procedure that specifies the observer who generates them as the standard observer who can perform the operations required for their generation. In other words, we are not usually aware that science is a closed cognitive domain in which all statements are, of necessity, subject dependent, valid only in the domain of interactions in which the standard observer exists and operates. As observers we generally take the observer for granted and, by accepting his universality by implication, ascribe many of the invariant features of our descriptions that depend on the standard observer to a reality that is ontologically objective and independent of us. Yet the power of science rests exactly on its subject dependent nature, which allows us to deal with the operative domain in which we exist.
  — Maturana 1978a, 29

• We can no longer accept the old a priori distinction between scientific and ethical values.
  — Prigogine and Stengers (1984, 312)

• … living, as all human beings must, in an enormously complex network of mutually supporting presuppositions.
  — G. Bateson

• Tiger got to hunt,
  Bird got to fly;
  Man got to sit and wonder, Why, why, why?
  Tiger got to sleep,
  Bird got to land;
  Man got to tell himself he understand.
  
  — The Books of Bokonon (Vonnegut 1963)

• Just as insects can alight anywhere except on the flames of a fire, the minds of sentient beings can relate to anything but wisdom.
  — Pai-chang (Cleary 1998, 149)

• No one understands everything, and no one needs to.
  — J. Redford

• He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
  — Ecclesiastes 1:18

• Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
  — Einstein

• To think one knows when one does not know is a dire disease.
  — Tao Te Ching 71 (Waley)

• As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
  — Einstein

• … mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
  — Bertrand Russell (1917, 59-60)

• I am certain of one thing—of course I could be wrong.
  — gnox

• The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we can imagine.
  — J.B.S. Haldane

• We are circumveiloped by obscuritads.
  — Finnegans Wake, 244

• Whence it is a slopperish matter, given the wet and low visibility (since in this scherzarade of one's thousand one nightinesses that sword of certainty which would indentifide the body never falls) to idendifine the individuone in squarecuts, stock lavaleer, regattable oxeter, baggy pants and shufflers (he is often alluded to as Slypatrick, the llad in the llane) with already an incipience (lust!) in the direction of area baldness (one is continually firstmeeting with odd sorts of others at all sorts of ages!) who was asked by free boardschool shirkers in drenched coats overawall, Will, Conn and Otto, to tell them overagait, Vol, Pov and Dev, that fishabed ghoatstory of the haardly creditable edventyres of the Haberdasher, the two Curchies and the three Enkelchums in their Bearskin ghoats!
  — Finnegans Wake, 51

• When then is time? I know what it is if no one asks me what it is; but if I want to explain it to someone who has asked me, I find that I do not know.
  — Augustine, Confessions, tr. Warner

• Certainty closes down one's mind and heart.
  — Robert Theobald

• Certainty is immunity to revelation, just as death is immunity to experience.
  — gnox

• Stay us wherefore in our search for tighteousness, O Sustainer, what time we rise and when we take up to toothmick and before we lump down upown our leatherbed and in the night and at the fading of the stars!
  — Finnegans Wake, 5

• Magma Mater, smolt mine umbeleaf!
  — gnox

• I surrender to the belief that my knowing is a small part of a wider integrated knowing that knits the entire biosphere or creation.
  — G. Bateson

• Encourage students to believe that a good process will lead to good, if unpredictable, outcomes. This is called living by faith.
  — John Tallmadge

• In Buddhism, faith means confidence in our and others' abilities to wake up to our deepest capacity for love and understanding.
  — Thich Nhat Hanh (1995, 12)

• Test yourself on humanity. It makes the doubtful doubt, the believer believe.
  — Kafka (1936, 176)

• A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.
  — Havelock Ellis

• Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.
  — Montaigne

• Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
  — Mark Twain

• Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith.
  — Tillich

• He is cured by faith who is sick of fate.
  — Finnegans Wake, 482

• A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
  — Alan Watts

• Myths are not explanations. Myths are not primitive science. Myths are not mistaken beliefs. Rather, myths are metaphorical narratives about the relation between this world and the sacred.
  — Borg 2001, 71

• It is only when a myth is accepted as an imaginative story that it is really believed in. As a story, a myth becomes a model of human experience, and its relation to that experience becomes a confronting and present experience.
  — Frye (1980, 29)

• There extand by now one thousand and one stories, all told, of the same.
  — Finnegans Wake, 5

• Our most powerful story, equivalent in its way to a universal myth, is evolution.
  — Lewis Thomas

• Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
  — Einstein 1956, 24

• My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
  — Einstein

• Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours.
  — Black Elk

• There is no changing the nature created by God. That is the right religion, but most of humanity does not know.
  — Qur'án 30:30 (Cleary)

• SourceNet: perception
  

• You can observe a lot just by watchin'.
  — Yogi Berra

• All experience is subjective.
  — Bateson (1979, 33)

• There is no immaculate perception.
  — Szilard

• … we perceive what we are adjusted for interpreting, though it be far less perceptible than any express effort could enable us to perceive; while that, to the interpretation of which our adjustments are not fitted, we fail to perceive although it exceed in intensity what we should perceive with the utmost ease, if we cared at all for its interpretation.
  — Peirce, Buchler 1955, 305

• It is very helpful to look deeply into the nature of our perceptions, without being too sure of anything. When we are too sure, we suffer.
  — Thich Nhat Hanh (1998, 179)

• … each of us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
  — William James (1890, v. 1, 410)

• Perception is an act of imagination based upon the available information.
  — Durgin 2002, 88

• All that we can know comes through the imagination, which allows us to generalize and abstract to create the internal structures with which we act and understand.
  — W. Freeman (1999a, 164)

• The world appears to us to contain objects and events. This way of looking at the world is so basic as to seem to be a consequence of the way the individual human central nervous system develops in its very early stages. Yet our stimulus world is not partitioned in this way, and certainly not uniquely partitioned in this way.
  — Turner (1991, 60)

• The division of the perceived universe into parts and wholes is convenient and may be necessary, but no necessity determines how it shall be done.
  — G. Bateson

• The neural patterns and the corresponding mental images of the objects and events outside the brain are creations of the brain related to the reality that prompts their creation rather than passive mirror images reflecting that reality.
  — Damasio (2003, 198-9)

• Concepts are not given to us by the world, but are the products of our attempts, as a species and as individuals, to make sense of our worlds. They are ineradicably imaginative, and exist only in the brain.
  — Turner (1991, 46)

• Concepts are active, dynamic devices in the brain that compete with each other to become active in the attempt to make sense of things.
  — Turner (1991, 45)

• Concepts are structured biologically and culturally, in the history of the individual, its species, and its culture, under the constraints of fitness.
  — Turner (1991, 60)

• The primal prejudice is our own conceptual system.
  — Lakoff (1987, 264)

• So long as I keep before me the ideal of an absolute observer, of knowledge in the absence of any viewpoint, I can only see my situation as being a source of error. But once I have acknowledged that through it I am geared to all actions and all knowledge that are meaningful to me, and that it is gradually filled with everything that may be for me, then my contact with the social in the finitude of my situation is revealed to me as the starting point of all truth, including that of science and, since we have some idea of the truth, since we are inside truth and cannot get outside it, all that I can do is define a truth within the situation.
  — Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Prigogine and Stengers (1984, 299)

• It's difficult to see the picture when you are inside the frame.
  — anon

• I never understand anything until I have written about it.
  — Horace Walpole

• How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?
  — E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel

• We speak, not only to tell others what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think.
  — J. Hughlings Jackson (quoted in Dennett 1991, 194)

• So see we so as seed we sow.
  — Finnegans Wake, 250

• How you look depends on where you go.
  — anon

• After the revolution, the normal situation changes, and then the sense changes of what a normal situation is. So what you actually mean when you speak of a normal situation depends on what revolution you are after.
  — gnox

• People only notice squeaky wheels.
  — anon

• We are vigilant for the new and the variable. But attending to what varies and not to what abides means that we see only a contingent aspect, when we believe ourselves to be seeing the whole.
  — Turner (1991, 64)

• SourceNet link
  

• Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
  — Wallace Stevens

• A metaphor is a mapping of a source conceptual schema (such as our conceptual schema for journey) onto a target conceptual schema (such as our conceptual schema for life).
  — Turner (1991, 52)

• Metaphor is not merely an instance of language, a special rhetorical device used for communication and persuasion. Instead metaphor is a fundamental mental capacity by which people understand themselves and the world through the conceptual mapping of knowledge from one domain onto another.
  — Gibbs (1994, 207)

• Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
  — Einstein

• The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of mystery.
  — Huston Smith

• Everything that surrounds us is an unfathomable mystery.

  We must try to unravel these mysteries, but without ever hoping to accomplish this.

  A warrior takes his rightful place among mysteries and regards himself as one. Consequently, for a warrior there is no end to the mystery of being, whether being means being a pebble, or an ant, or oneself. That is a warrior's humbleness. One is equal to everything.

  — Castaneda 1981, p. 281

• The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
  — Einstein

• Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.
  — Wallace Stevens

• The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.
  — Einstein

• He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.
  — M. C. Escher

• We must believe in free will—we have no choice.
  — Isaac Bashevis Singer (in many interviews)

• We choose our world and the world chooses us.
  — Merleau-Ponty (1945, 527)

• A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.
  — Schopenhauer

• Who guides those whom God has led astray?
  — Qur'án 30:29 (Cleary)

• There's a split in the infinitive from to have to have been to will be.
  — Finnegans Wake, 271

• Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.
  — Camus

• You must be there better than that if you want them to let you go.
  — Beckett

• Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
  — Thomas Paine

• If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
  — George Orwell

• To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
  — Virginia Woolf

• Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery—none but ourselves can free our minds.
  — Bob Marley

• No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
  — Blake

• It is better to strive in one's own dharma than to succeed in the dharma of another.
  — Bhagavad Gita 3:35 (Easwaran)

• Freedom lies only in our innate human capacity to choose between different sorts of bondage, bondage to desire or self esteem, or bondage to the light that lightens all our lives.
  — Sri Madhava

• The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.
  — Einstein

• The greatest gift you can offer anyone is your undivided attention.
  — gnox

• A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest … a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
  — Einstein

• But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish.
  — Luke 6:35, RSV

• If man knew how God had created His creation, no one would ever blame another.
  — The Báb

• The sage keeps his half of the bargain but does not exact his due.
  — Tao Te Ching 79 (Feng/English)

• He who wants to do good knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the gate open.
  — Tagore

• Unless our love is made of understanding, it is not true love.
  — Thich Nhat Hanh (1998, 83)

• He who does not trust enough will not be trusted.
  — Tao Te Ching 23 (Feng/English)

• Love truth, pardon error.
  — Voltaire

• Hate the sin and love the sinner.
  — Gandhi

• Judge not, that ye be not judged.
  — Matthew 7:1

• People who really practice the Way
  Do not see the faults of the world;
  If you see the errors of others,
  Your own error abets them.
  If others err but you do not,
  Your own error's still faulty.
  
  — Hui-neng (Cleary 1998, 23)

• It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
  — anon

• Good men do not argue; those who argue are not good.
  — Tao Te Ching 81 (Feng/English)

• Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds.
  — Einstein

• The Sage does not contend, and for that very reason no one under heaven can contend with him.
  — Tao Te Ching 22 (Waley)

• To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies.
  — P.K. Dick, VALIS

• Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave.
  — Vonnegut, Player Piano

• The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.
  — G. Bateson (1972, 493)

• Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the cancer cell.
  — Edward Abbey

• Progress is a comfortable disease.
  — e.e. cummings

• When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly.
  When people see some things as good, other things become bad.
  — Tao Te Ching 2 (Mitchell)

• Therefore having and not having arise together.
  Difficult and easy complement each other.
  Long and short contrast each other;
  High and low depend on each other;
  Front and back follow one another.
  — Tao Te Ching 2 (Feng/English)

• Roots are the branches down in the earth. Branches are roots in the air.
  — Tagore

• That which shrinks
  Must first expand.
  That which fails
  Must first be strong.
  That which is cast down
  Must first be raised.
  — Tao Te Ching 36 (Feng/English)

• Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
  — Luke 18:14

• To be bent is to become straight. To be worn out is to be renewed.
  — Tao Te Ching 22 (Chan)

• Therefore the Master
  acts without doing anything
  and teaches without saying anything.
  Things arise and she lets them come;
  things disappear and she lets them go.
  She has but doesn't possess,
  acts but doesn't expect.
  — Tao Te Ching 2 (Mitchell)

• Good and evil, dead and alive, everything blooms from one natural stem.
  — Rúmí

• Good pitching will always stop good hitting, and vice versa.
  — Yogi Berra

• We can know good as good only because there is evil.
  — Tao Te Ching

• It is thanks to disease that health is pleasant.
  — Heraclitus

• The sadness of my soul is like her bride's veil. It waits to be lifted in the night.
  — Tagore

• What's good for the gorse is a goad for the garden.
  — Finnegans Wake, 450

• If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.
  — Thoreau, Walden, chp. 1

• When Tao is lost, there is goodness. When goodness is lost, there is kindness. When kindness is lost, there is justice. When justice is lost, there is ritual.
  — Tao Te Ching 38 (Feng/English)

• Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion.
  — Blake

• Good by nature and natural by design, had you but been spared to us, Hauneen lad, but sure where's the use my talking quicker when I know you'll hear me all astray?
  — Finnegans Wake, 472

• Those who fall into the delusion that the sacred Reality is located Elsewhere project this private fall onto Creation.
  — gnox

• Because advertising, with monstrous effectiveness, attributes perfection to everything—and so to books, to every book—a person is beguiled by twenty thousand Miss Universes at once and, unable to decide, lingers unfulfilled in amorous readiness like a sheep in a stupor. So it is with everything. Cable television, broadcasting forty programs at once, produces in the viewer the feeling that, since there are so many, others must be better than the one he has on, so he jumps from program to program like a flea on a hot stove, proof that technological progress produces new heights of frustration.… There had to be a book, then, about what Everybody Else was doing, so that we would be tormented no longer by the doubt that we were reading nonsense while the Important Things were taking place Elsewhere.
  — Stanislaw Lem (1986), 3

• Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. [The world is all that is the case.]
  — Wittgenstein (Tractatus 1)

• Creation itself was the fall, a burst into the thorny beauty of the real.
  — Annie Dillard (1974, 209)

• Original sin was committed by God. It is simply the act of creation.
  — theological axiom of Finnegans Wake, as summarized by Atherton (1959), 53

• O foenix culprit! Ex nickylow malo comes mickelmassed bonum.
  — Finnegans Wake, 23

• The fall is the Fall into Division of the one universal man.
  — Brown 1966, 21

• Without the Fool wandering off the well-worn path, there can be no learning. Without the Fall into time there can be no eternal Salvation.
  — gnox

• If all time is eternally present
  All time is unredeemable.
  
  — T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’

• For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he may have mercy upon all.
  — Romans 11:32

• One person's error is another person's data.
  — gnox

• Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself.
  — Eleanor Roosevelt

• Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
  — Einstein

• In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few.
  — S. Suzuki 1970

• There is another aspect to the hope placed in randomness: to a program that exploits randomness, all pathways are open, even if most have very low probabilities; conversely, to a program whose choices are always made by consulting a fixed deterministic strategy, many pathways are a priori completely closed off. This means that many creative ideas will simply never get discovered by a program that relies totally on ‘intelligence’. In many circumstances, the most interesting routes will be more likely to be discovered by accidental exploration than if the ‘best’ route at each junction is invariably chosen.
  — Hofstadter and FARG (1995, 115)

• Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.
  — 1 Corinthians 3:18

• If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.
  — Blake

• The summit of Wisdom is the Opening of the Way that leadeth unto the Crown and Essence of all, to the Soul of the Child Horus, the Lord of the Aeon. This Way is the Path of the Pure Fool.

  And who is this Pure Fool? Lo, in the Sagas of old Time, Legend of Scald, of Bard, of Druid, cometh he not in Green like Spring? O thou Great Fool, thou Water that art Air, in whom all Complex is resolved!

  — Crowley, Liber Aleph 207-8

• You are pure. You are pure. You are in your puerity.
  — Finnegans Wake, 237

• The perfect knot needs neither rope nor twine, yet cannot be untied.
  — Tao Te Ching 27 (Waley)

• For the clarity we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.
  — Wittgenstein (PI I.133)

• For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
  — anon

• Water which is too pure has no fish.
  — Ts'ai Ken T'an

• Ring the bells that still can ring.
  Forget your perfect offering.
  There is a crack          a crack          in everything.
  That's how the light gets in.
  — Leonard Cohen

• Leave the letter that never begins to go find the latter that ever comes to end, written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed of solitude, sealed at night.
  — Finnegans Wake, 337

• That letter selfpenned to one's other, that neverperfect everplanned?
  — Finnegans Wake, 489

• A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.
  — Patton

• Everyone is in the best seat.
  — John Cage

• SourceNet link
  

• Social systems, like systems in nature, form ‘holarchies’.
  — Laszlo (1996, 51)

• None of us can fully realize what the minds of corporations are, any more than one of my brain cells can know what the whole brain is thinking.
  — Peirce (EP1:350)

• Diversity is the health of ecosystems.
  — Roszak

• We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.
  — Tagore

• To darkness are they doomed who devote themselves only to life in the world, and to a greater darkness they who devote themselves only to meditation.
  — Isha Upanishad (Prabhavananda)

• All this is for habitation by the Lord.
  — Isha Upanishad (Aurobindo)

• You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars; and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.
  — Thomas Traherne, The First Century 29

• Each of us inevitable,
  Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the earth,
  Each of us allow'd the eternal purports of the earth,
  Each of us here as divinely as any is here.
  
  — Whitman, Leaves of Grass Book VI

• To seek Buddhahood apart from living beings is like seeking echoes by silencing sounds.
  — Layman Hsiang (Cleary 1999, 93)

• Seeking enlightenment apart from the world
  Is like looking for horns on a hare.
  — Hui-neng (Cleary 1998, 23)

• Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things.
  — Tao Te Ching 13 (Feng/English)

• The world is a mirror of Infinite Beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God. It is more to man since he is fallen than it was before. It is the place of Angels and the Gate of Heaven. When Jacob waked out of his dream, he said, God is here, and I wist it not. How dreadful is this place! This is none other than the House of God and the Gate of Heaven.
  — Thomas Traherne, The First Century 31

• The world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover. It becomes as small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal.
  — Tagore

• [SourceNet link]
  

• Experience is what happens just before you notice that something's happened. Afterwards, experience is what you remember. Until you notice that remembering has happened.
  — gnox

• The world rushes on over the strings of the lingering heart making the music of sadness.
  — Tagore

• Experience enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
  — Franklin Jones

• Experience is our only teacher.… It is by surprises that experience teaches all she deigns to teach us.
  — Peirce (EP1:153-4)

• All experience is subjective.
  — G. Bateson

• Experience is the testing ground of all claims to truth, as the etymology indicates: the original Latin verb means to try or put to the test. Learning from experience means seeing for yourself rather than taking authority's word for it.
  — gnox

• I'm not young enough to know everything.
  — J.M. Barrie

• To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.
  — Dogen, in Tanahashi 1985, 69

• You have been selected for a secret mission.
  — gnox

• You are unique, just like everyone else.
  — anon

• You are the problem. No scholar to be found far and wide.
  — Kafka (1936, 166)

• Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
  — Richard Feynman (from lecture given at the Galileo Symposium in Italy, 1964).

• By one's self the evil is done, by one's self one suffers; by one's self evil is left undone, by one's self one is purified. The pure and the impure stand and fall by themselves, no one can purify another.
  — Dhammapada XII (tr. F. Max Müller)

• Like the concept of zero in mathematics, the idea of a self is useful, so long as you don't mistake it for a thing.
  — M.C. Bateson (1994, 66)

• One common image of the Self suggests that every mind contains some sort of Voyeur-Puppeteer inside to feel and want and choose for us the things we feel, want and choose.… Is this concept of a Self of any real use at all? It is indeed—provided that we think of it not as a centralized and all-powerful entity, but as a society of ideas that include both our images of what the mind is and our ideals about what it ought to be.
  — Minsky (1986, §4.2)

• No such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models. The phenomenal self is not a thing, but a process—and the subjective experience of being someone emerges if a conscious information-processing system operates under a transparent self-model.
  — Metzinger (2003, 1)

• Show me the face you had before the world was born.
  — Hui-neng

• Strictly speaking, no one was ever born and no one ever dies. The interesting question is whether purely theoretical points like this can help us in the situation we now find ourselves in.
  — Metzinger (2003, 633n)

• The Self is one, and it has become all things.
  — Chandogya Upanishad (Prabhavananda and Manchester 1947, 118)

• He is one, the lord and innermost Self of all; of one form, he makes of himself many forms. To him who sees the Self revealed in his own heart belongs eternal bliss—to none else, to none else!
  This universe is a tree eternally existing, its root aloft, its branches spread below. The pure root of the tree is Brahman, the immortal, in whom the three worlds have their being, whom none can transcend, who is verily the Self.
  — Katha Upanishad

• He hath known God who hath known himself.
  — hadíth of Imám ‘Alí

• Self is arrayed as the whole world.
  — Dogen, Uji (Cleary 1986, 345)

• … it follows from our own existence (which is proved by the occurrence of ignorance and error) that everything which is present to us is a phenomenal manifestation of ourselves.
  — Peirce (EP1:38)

• The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.
  — Merleau-Ponty (1945, 499-500)

• Three things in this life are destructive: Anger, Greed, Self-esteem.
  — Sufi saying

• Every need got an ego to feed.
  — Bob Marley

• Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
  — Matthew 19:19

• … your neighbors are, in a measure, yourself, and in far greater measure than, without deep studies in psychology, you would believe. Really, the selfhood you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity.
  — Peirce (EP1:2)

• He who sees all beings in the Self, and the Self in all beings, hates none and fears nothing.
  — Mascaró/Prabhavananda, Isha Upanishad

• And each was wrought with his other. And his continence fell.
  — Finnegans Wake, 252

• As long as I am this or that, or have this or that, I am not all things and I have not all things. Become pure till you neither are nor have either this or that; then you are omnipresent and, being neither this nor that, are all things.
  — Meister Eckhart, in Huxley (1945), 107

• Comport yourself, you inconsistency!
  — Finnegans Wake, 192

• We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
  — Kurt Vonnegut

• People become what they think they are, or what they find that others think they are, in a process of negotiation that snowballs constantly.
  — Daniel Wegner (2002, 314)

• Love my label like myself.
  — Finnegans Wake, 579

• Some spiritual traditions refer to the ultimate reality as the Self. Others refer to the Self as an illusion. The correctness of both views is self-evident.
  — gnox

• A man is capable of having assigned to him a rôle in the drama of creation; and so far as he loses himself in that rôle,—no matter how humble it may be,—he so far identifies himself with its Author.
  — Peirce (EP1:3)

• Our duty is to strive for self-realization and we should lose ourselves in that aim.
  — Gandhi 1926, 86

• He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world, is, as it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences, collectively. Logic is rooted in the social principle.
  — Peirce (EP1:149)

• No man is a hero to anyone that knows him.
  — Wallace Stevens (1957, 174)

• This sentence contradicts itself—or rather—well, no, actually it doesn't!
  — Hofstadter (1985, 7)

• Only a buddha together with a buddha can fathom the Reality of All Existence.
  — Lotus Sutra 2 (Kato et al. 1975, 52)

• All communication from mind to mind is through continuity of being.
  — Peirce (EP2:3)

• Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying.
  — Baba Ram Dass

• If I were you, who would be reading this sentence?
  — anon

• Therefore it is necessary to follow the common; but although the Logos is common the many live as as though they had a private understanding.
  — Heraclitus (Kirk and Raven 1957, 188)

• Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.
  — Heraclitus

• Unity is the eternal truth of things, diversity a play of the unity.
  — Aurobindo [1996], 35

• To Tao all under heaven will come as streams and torrents flow into a great river or sea.
  — Tao Te Ching 32 (Waley)

• When the Many are reduced to One, to what is the One reduced?
  — Zen koan

• One real world is enough.
  — Santayana

• Say: All things are of God.
  — Bahá'u'lláh, Book of the Covenant

• Wherever you turn, there is the Face of God.
  — Qur'án 2:115 (Cleary)

• The vast inconceivable source can't be faced or turned away from.
  — Shitou (Tanahashi and Schneider 1994, 36)

• It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is.
  — Hesse

• The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.
  — Thomas Berry (1999, 82)

• Instead of noblemen, let us have noble villages of men.
  — Thoreau, Walden, chp. 4

• All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.
  — Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

• The hilariohoot of Pegger's Windup cumjustled as neatly with the tristitone of the Wet Pinter's as were they isce et ille equals of opposites, evolved by a onesame power of nature or of spirit, iste, as the sole condition and means of its himundher manifestation and polarised for reunion by the symphysis of their antipathies.
  — Finnegans Wake, 92

• (from each equinoxious points of view, the one fellow's fetch being the other follow's person)
  — Finnegans Wake, 85

• The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.
  — Heraclitus

• Power is poison.
  — Henry Adams

• Finding the meaning that is inherent in our very existence is a matter of awakening from the collective cultural trance of Empire and embracing life itself as a spiritual practice.
  — David Korten (2006, 261)

• I thank thee that I am none of the wheels of power but I am one of the living creatures that are crushed by it.
  — Tagore

• When Nature and humanity do not overpower each other, this is called real humanity.
  — Chuang-tzu 6 (Cleary)

• The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking.
  — Einstein

• We ARE as gods and might as well get good at it.
  — Whole Earth Catalog

• The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
  — Ehrlich

• Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.
  — Einstein

• Damn braces; bless relaxes.
  — Blake

• Opposition always enflames the enthusiast, never converts him.
  — Schiller

• Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it's the only thing that ever has.
  — Margaret Mead

• The path to guidance is one of love and compassion, not of force and coercion.
  —The Báb, Persian Bayan II.16

• No man is good enough to govern another without that other's consent.
  — Lincoln

• The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens.
  — Bahá'u'lláh

• The other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent.
  — Thoreau, Walden, chp. 18

• The well-being of mankind, its peace and security, are unattainable unless and until its unity is firmly established.
  — Bahá'u'lláh

• The heaven of divine wisdom is illumined with the two luminaries of consultation and compassion. Take ye counsel together in all matters, inasmuch as consultation is the lamp of guidance which leadeth the way, and is the bestower of understanding.
  — Bahá'u'lláh

• What bird has done yesterday man may do next year, be it fly, be it moult, be it hatch, be it agreement in the nest.
  — Finnegans Wake 112

• The world is in the bonds of action, unless the action is consecration. Let thy actions then be pure, free from the bonds of desire.
  — Bhagavad-Gita 3:9 (Mascaró)

• When all desires that cling to the heart are surrendered, then a mortal becomes immortal, and even in this world he is one with Brahman.
  — Mascaró, Katha Upanishad

• You are locked into your suffering, and your pleasures are the seal.
  — Leonard Cohen

• Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
  — Simone Weil

• Well may he be content to live a hundred years who acts without attachment—who works his work with earnestness, but without desire, not yearning for its fruits—he, and he alone.
  — Isha Upanishad (Prabhavananda)

• Set thy heart upon thy work, but never upon its reward.
  — Bhagavad-Gita 2:47 (Mascaró)

• Make not your deeds as snares wherewith to entrap the object of your aspiration …
  — Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas ¶36

• Seers in union with wisdom forsake the rewards of their work, and free from the bonds of birth they go to the abode of salvation.
  — Bhagavad-Gita 2:51 (Mascaró)

• We should trust God as though our salvation were entirely in His hands, and act as though it were entirely in our own.
  — al-Ghazali

• If we wish to give up sin, we should give up virtue too. There is possessiveness in clinging even to virtue.
  — Gandhi

• Nothing being more important than anything else, a man of knowledge chooses any act, and acts it out as if it matters to him. His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn't; so when he fulfills his acts he retreats in peace, and whether his acts were good or bad, or worked or didn't, is in no way part of his concern.
  — Castaneda 1971

• Live with cause and leave results to the great law of the universe.
  — Zengetsu

• You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
  — Steven Wright

• He who holds fast to the Way desires not to be full.
  — Tao Te Ching

• A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
  — Thoreau, Walden, chp. 2

• People must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them.
  — Ivan Illich

• Set the bird's wings with gold and it will never again soar in the sky.
  — Tagore

• He who knows he has enough is rich.
  — Tao Te Ching 33 (Feng/English)

• Too much is not enough.
  — anon

• To have plenty is to be perplexed.
  — Tao Te Ching 22 (Chan)

• The best things in life aren't things.
  — Buchwald

• Live simply that others may simply live.
  — Gandhi

• And whoso is saved from his own greed, such are the successful.
  — Qur'án 64:16 (Pickthall)

• It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living feely and nobly.
  — Bertrand Russell

• The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
  — Lily Tomlin

• He who dies with the most toys, dies.
  — anon

• In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
  — Ivan Illich

• Who owns anything he has not made?
  — Leonard Cohen

• The Way is the refuge for the myriad creatures.
  — Tao Te Ching

• Security is mostly a superstition.
  — Helen Keller

• When you ain't got nothin, you got nothin to lose.
  — Bob Dylan, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’

• In insecurity to lie is joy's insuring quality.
  — Emily Dickinson

• The determination to dominate the universe so that all insecurity, limitation, destruction, and the threat of destruction could be eliminated eventuated in racism, militarism, sexism, and anthropocentrism, dysfunctional maneuvers of the human species in its quest to deal with what it regarded as the unacceptable aspects of the universe.
  — Swimme and Berry (1992, 56)

• Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
  And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:
  And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
  Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
  — Matthew 6:25, 28-9, 34 (KJV)

• There is no greater sin than desire,
  No creater curse than discontent,
  No greater misfortune than wanting something for oneself.
  Therefore he who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.
  — Tao Te Ching 46 (Feng/English)

• God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.
  — Valéry

• Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
  — Ecclesiastes 1:2

• You are really the natural form of emptiness, so there is no need to fear.
  — Tibetan Book of the Dead

• Firm as the thunderbolt, the seat of the seeker is established above the void.
  — Kabir I.68, (Tagore 1915)

• The reason angels can fly is that they take themselves so lightly.
  — Chesterton

• Great fullness seems empty, yet it cannot be exhausted.
  — Tao Te Ching 45 (Feng/English)

• Nothing is handy if you have no hands.
  — gnox

• Do not blame your food because you have no appetite.
  — Tagore

• If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail.
  — Maslow

• All men know the use of the useful, but nobody knows the use of the useless!
  — Chuangtse 4

• True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds.
  — C. S. Peirce (CP 1.76)

• Use, purpose and meaning depend on context. How can that which provides the context for everything have its own use, purpose or meaning?
  — gnox

• The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows.
  The shape changes, but not the form;
  The more it moves, the more it yields.
  — Tao Te Ching 5 (Feng/English)

• No wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.
  — the Mock Turtle

• At the beginning of the movie, they know they have to find each other. But they ride off in opposite directions.
  — Laurie Anderson, ‘Sharkey's Day’

• In the marvelous thirteenth-century legend called La Queste del Saint Graal, it is told that when the Knights of the Round Table set forth, each on his own steed, in quest of the Holy Grail, they departed separately from the castle of King Arthur. And now each one, we are told, went the way upon which he had decided, and they set out into the forest at one point and another, there where they saw it to be thickest (la ou il la voient plus espesse).
  — Joseph Campbell (1968a), 36

• Toties testies quoties questies. The war is in words and the wood is the world. Maply me, willowy we, hickory he and yew yourselves. Howforhim chirrupeth evereach-bird! From golddawn glory to glowworm gleam. We were lowquacks did we not tacit turn.
  — Finnegans Wake, 98-99

• The path is not the forest.
  — gnox

• Seekers after gold dig up much earth and find little.
  — Heraclitus (Wheelwright 1959, #4)

• Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?
  — Finnegans Wake, 114

• You cannot find unless you seek; and seeking is all that keeps you from finding.
  — gnox

• Wild goose chase: 2. fig. An erratic course taken or led by one person (or thing) and followed (or that may be followed) by another (or taken by a person in following his own inclinations or impulses); in later use (the origin being forgotten) apprehended as ‘a pursuit of something as unlikely to be caught as the wild goose’ (Johnson); a foolish, fruitless or hopeless quest.
  — Oxford English Dictionary

• Where I'm coming from is the place I've left behind.
  — gnox

• There is the path of joy, and there is the path of pleasure. Both attract the soul. Who follows the first comes to good; who follows pleasure reaches not the End.
  — Katha Upanishad (Mascaró)

• You always find what you're looking for in the last place you look.
  — anon

• In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. Allmen.
  — Finnegans Wake, 419

• Cull me ere I wilt to thee!
  — Finnegans Wake, 15

• Sometimes I fall on my knees and I pray
  God won't let me see another day
  Then I wake up and I thank God that He's
  Ignored my prayers again
  — Bob Geldof, ‘The Chains of Pain’

• The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows.
  The more it moves, the more it yields.
  — Tao Te Ching 5 (Feng/English)

• O Loud, hear the wee beseech of thees of each of these thy unlitten ones! Grant sleep in hour's time, O Loud!
  — Finnegans Wake, 259

• As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers.

  Prayers plow not! Praises reap not!
  Joys laugh not! Sorrows weep not!

  — Blake

• I have come to see that I do not limit my mind enough simply to prayer, that I always want to do something myself in it, wherein I do very wrong.… I wish most definitely to cut off and separate my mind from all that, and to hold it with all my strength, as much as I can, to the sole regard and simple unity. By allowing the fear of being ineffectual to enter into the state of prayer, and by wishing to accomplish something myself, I spoilt it all.
  — St. Jeanne Chantal (Huxley 1945, 226)

• One who sits down with the purpose of becoming convinced of the truth of religion is plainly not inquiring in scientific singleness of heart, and must aways suspect himself of reasoning unfairly.… But let religious meditation be allowed to grow up spontaneously out of Pure Play without any breach of continuity, and the Muser will retain the perfect candour proper to Musement.
  — Peirce (EP2:436)

• Enter your skiff of Musement, push off into the lake of thought, and leave the breath of heaven to swell your sail. With your eyes open, awake to what is about or within you, and open conversation with yourself; for such is all meditation.
  — Peirce (EP2:437)

• To pray is to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living.
  — Rabbi Abraham Heschel

• Be still, my heart, these great trees are prayers.
  — Tagore

• He who knows glory but keeps to humility becomes the valley of the world.
  — Tao Te Ching 28 (Chan)

• In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!
  — Finnegans Wake, 104

• Who sends the mind to wander afar? Who first drives life to start on its journey? Who impels us to utter these words? What cannot be spoken with words, but that whereby words are spoken: Know that alone to be Brahman, the spirit; and not what people here adore.
  — Kena Upanishad

• How can anyone hide from that which never sets?
  — Heraclitus

• The Realized One comes from nowhere and goes nowhere; that is why he is called the Realized One.
  — Diamond Sutra (Cleary 1998, 140)

• The wind [pneuma] bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the spirit [pneuma].
  — John 3:8

• You hear the piping of men but you haven't heard the piping of earth. Or if you've heard the piping of earth, you haven't heard the piping of heaven!
  — Chuangtse 2 (Watson 1968, 36)

• They said to Him, ‘Tell us who You are so that we may believe in You.’

  He said to them, ‘You read the face of the sky and of the earth, but you have not recognized the one who is before you, and you do not know how to read this moment.’

  — Gospel of Thomas 91 (Lambdin)

• Confucius said, If we are not yet able to serve man, how can we serve spiritual beings? If we do not yet know about life, how can we know about death?
  — Analects 11.11 (Chan)

• Or in the spaces between, feel this as lightning.
  — Shiva (Reps 1957, 194)

• A line drawn by a Sumiye artist is final, nothing can go beyond it, nothing can retrieve it; it is just inevitable as a flash of lightning; the artist himself cannot undo it; from this issues the beauty of the line. Things are beautiful when they are inevitable, that is, when they are free expressions of a spirit.
  — D.T. Suzuki (1956, 281)

• The gaps are the spirit's one home …
  — Annie Dillard

• The spirit is that which can have no resting place.
  — Merleau-Ponty (1948, 75)

• … and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
  — Ecclesiastes 1:6

• A road is made by people walking on it; things are so because they are called so.
  — Chuangtse 2 (Watson 1968, 40)

• Human beings can talk about things because they generate the things they talk about by talking about them.
  — Maturana 1978a, 56

• The very way in which language is used synchronously (at a given time by a given community) is also the way language will change.
  — Fauconnier and Turner (2002, 384)

• Stay with the ancient Tao, move with the present.
  — Tao Te Ching

• A journey of a thousand miles starts under one's feet.
  — Tao Te Ching 64 (Feng/English)

• In the universe great acts are made up of small deeds.
  — Tao Te Ching 63 (Feng/English)

• Change happens when a lot of people do a lot of things a little differently.
  — Willis Harman

• A good walker leaves no tracks.
  — Tao Te Ching

• The Way is never busy, yet nothing is left undone.
  — Tao Te Ching

• The nameless uncarved block is but freedom from desire.
  — Tao Te Ching

• When the great Way falls into disuse, benevolence and rectitude appear.
  — Tao Te Ching

• In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.
  — Tao Te Ching 48 (Feng/English)

• The way up and the way down are one and the same.
  — Heraclitus (Wheelwright 1959, #108)

• It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
  — Ursula Le Guin

• Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea.
  Look, it cannot be seen. Follow it and there is no end.
  — Tao Te Ching

• I myself have traversed it this way and that; yet still know only where it begins. I have roamed at will through its stupendous spaces. I know how to get to them, but I do not know where they end.
  — Chuang Tzu (Waley 1939, 52)

• The silence speaks the scene.
  — Finnegans Wake, 13

• What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
  — Wittgenstein (Tractatus 7)

• Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
  — Beckett

• Silence heals all words.
  — gnox

• More words count less.
  — Tao Te Ching 5 (Feng/English)

• The wise are they that speak not unless they obtain a hearing.
  — Bahá'u'lláh, Hidden Words (Persian) #36

• There is the silence of not speaking;
  and there is the silence of saying what is to be said
  and knowing that its truth is unknown.
  — gnox

• As the truest society approaches always nearer to solitude, so the most excellent speech finally falls into Silence.
  — Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Bode 1964, 225)

• I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
  — John Cage

• With the lamp of word and discrimination one must go beyond word and discrimination and enter upon the path of realization.
  — Lankavatara Sutra, in Huxley 1945, 133

• Perfect activity leaves no track behind it; perfect speech is like a jade-worker whose tool leaves no mark.
  — Tao Te Ching 27 (Waley)

• Be silent as a serpent
  or be dumb as a gnox.
  — gnox

1. Most generally, any factor which guides, informs or modulates an ongoing process. Thus Salthe, in a 2006 article: ‘materially, (i.e., thermodynamically), information acts as any constraint (restrictive or enabling or both) on entropy production—which is to say, on anything at all that might happen in the natural world’.
2. a difference that makes a difference (Gregory Bateson)
3. the resolving of uncertainty (Shannon)

• … unless uncertainty exists first, there can be no information.
  — Jeremy Campbell (1982, 254)

• We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.
  — Norbert Wiener

• … we are natural expressions of a deeper order.
  — Kauffman (1995, 112)

• Space tells matter how to move and matter tells space how to curve.
  — Wheeler

• … a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
  — Herbert Simon (1971)

• Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
  — Einstein

• This means you.
  
  

• Do you read me?
  
  

• This inert sentence is my body, but my soul is alive, dancing in the sparks of your brain.
  — Hofstadter (1985, 11)

• Nothing is meaningful in itself. Meaningfulness derives from the experience of functioning as a being of a certain sort in an environment of a certain sort.
  — Lakoff (1987, 292)

• Meaning is something people do—not something they find at the end of the rainbow. And they do it all the time, whether they mean to or not.
  — gnox

• I propose that meanings arise as a brain creates intentional behaviours and then changes itself in accordance with the sensory consequences of those behaviours.… Although the contents of meaning are largely social in origin, the mechanisms of meaning are biological and have to be understood in terms of brain dynamics.
  — Walter Freeman (1999a, 11)

• The biology of meaning includes the entire brain and body, with the history built by experience into bones, muscles, endocrine glands and neural connections. A meaningful state is an activity pattern of the nervous system and body that has a particular focus in the state space of the organism, not in the physical space of the brain.
  — W. Freeman (1999a, 157)

• Meaning is formed in the interaction between felt experiencing and something that functions symbolically. Feeling without symbolization is blind; symbolization without feeling is empty.
  — Gendlin (1997, 5)

• For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
  — Wittgenstein (PI I.43)

• To understand a sentence means to understand a language.
  — Wittgenstein (PI I.199)

• The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives signs.
  — Heraclitus (Wheelwright 1959, #18)

• This is the common situation of all language: expressions do not mean; they are prompts for us to construct meanings by working with processes we already know.
  — Turner (1991, 206)

• That which is unexpressed by the word, that by which the word is expressed, know That to be the Brahman and not this which men follow after here.
  — Kena Upanishad (Aurobindo)

• Wipe your glosses with what you know.
  — Finnegans Wake, 304

• The real with its meaning read wrong and emphasis misplaced is the unreal.
  — Tagore

• If you want to know the meaning of Buddha-nature, observe timing and conditions.
  — Ch'an Buddhist dictum (Cleary 1998, 148)

• My only drink is meaning from the deep brain,
  What the birds and the grass and the stones drink.
  — Seamus Heaney (from ‘The First Words,’ in The Spirit Level)

• Bethicket me for a stump of a beech if I have the poultriest notion what the farest he all means.
  — Finnegans Wake, 112

• … life is but a sequence of inferences or a train of thought …
  — Peirce (CP 7.583)

• The train that can be expressed is not the express train.
  — gnox

• The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.
  — Wittgenstein (PI I.132)

• … the whole function of thought is to produce habits of action … what a thing means is simply what habits it involves.
  — Peirce (EP1:131)

• Never mind the meaning of life, live like you mean it.
  — gnox

• A text is only as good as its best reader.
  — gnox

• Values are caught, not taught.
  — Dobson

• When in doubt, tell the truth.
  — Mark Twain

• When you come to a fork in the road—take it.
  — Yogi Berra

• The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
  — Blake

• I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough.
  — Thoreau, Walden, chp. 18

• Always think twice before taking advice.
  — gnox

• When wisdom and intelligence are born, the great pretense begins.
  — Tao Te Ching

• We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
  — Einstein

• Heaven and earth are impartial;
  They see the ten thousand things as straw dogs.
  The wise are impartial;
  They see the people as straw dogs.
  — Tao Te Ching 5 (Feng/English)

• Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
  — Bertrand Russell

• The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.… A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.… But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
  — Thoreau, Walden, chp. 1

• Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.
  — Einstein

• Transgress not thy limits, nor claim that which beseemeth thee not.
  — Bahá'u'lláh, Hidden Words (Arabic) #24

• Wisdom asks nothing more.
  — Wallace Stevens

• He who acts defeats his own purpose; he who grasps loses.
  — Tao Te Ching 64 (Feng/English)

• To grasp one is to let go of another.
  — gnox

• The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
  Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
  — T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’

• Only he who has a spirit of extreme humility can be said to have a resolute intellect.
  — Gandhi 1926, 47

• Open your mouth, always be busy, and life is beyond hope.
  — Tao Te Ching 52 (Feng/English)

• Almost dotty! I must dash!
  — Finnegans Wake, 360

• Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
  — Thoreau, Walden, chp. 1

• One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster.
  — Bertrand Russell

• Procrastinate now!
  — anon

• Humankind is made of haste. I will show you all My signs, so do not try to hurry Me.
  — Qur'án 21:37 (Cleary)

• If you are too busy to read, then you are too busy.
  — anon

• If you haven't time to do it right now, how will you redo it right later?
  — anon

• One can do one's duty only if one banishes all impatience and anxiety in regard to it.
  — Gandhi (1926, 73)

• The Sage's way is to act without striving.
  — Tao Te Ching 81 (Waley)

• Either you have work or you have not. When you have to say, ‘Let us do something,’ then begins mischief.
  — Tagore

• The heavy is the root of the light; the still is the lord of the restless.
  — Tao Te Ching 26 (Lau)

• The unmoved is the source of all movement.
  — Mitchell, Tao Te Ching 26

• Eternity now!
  — gnox

• Eternity is the divine Presence.
  — gnox

• God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.
  — Thoreau, Walden, chp. 2

• The present time has one advantage over every other. It is our own.
  — Colton

• Space is to place as eternity is to time.
  — Joseph Joubert

• Eternity is not another order of time, but the atmosphere of time.
  — Merleau-Ponty 1945, 457

• We must go beyond the temptation to define the eternal as truth and the temporal as illusion.
  — Prigogine, quoted in J. Campbell 1988

• Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
  — Blake

• This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day.
  — Annie Dillard (1974, 103)

• This is the time, and this is the record of the time.
  — Laurie Anderson

• Are you not danzzling on the age of a vulcano?
  — Finnegans Wake, 89

• No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.
  — Luke 9:62 (RSV)

• Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be.
  — anon

• The past will never look like the future did.
  — gnox

• Everything is always becoming something other than what it was becoming.
  — Merrell (2003, 70)

• He that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.
  — Ecclesiastes 11:4

• Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
  — Matthew 6:34

• I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
  — Einstein

• Those who go ahead of time are not wise.
  — Chuang-tzu 6 (Cleary)

• Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
  — Thoreau, Walden, chp. 2

• Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature.
  — Thoreau, Walden, chp. 2

• Lo, improving ages wait ye! In the orchard of the bones. Some time very presently now when yon clouds are dissipated after their forty years shower, the odds are, we shall all be hooked and happy, communionistically, among the fieldnights eliceam, élite of the elect, in the land of lost of time.
  — Finnegans Wake, 453

• Hell is where you are condemned to repeat your life, knowing it is already over and complete, and that's all there is to it.

  Heaven is where you are allowed to repeat your life, knowing it is already over and complete, and that's all there is to it.

  — gnox

• Heaven is the Presence where you are.
  Hell is wishing you were somewhere else.
  — gnox

• Heaven
  Heaven is a place
  a place where nothing
  nothing ever happens.
  — David Byrne

• Innocence sees that this is it, and finds it world enough, and time.
  — Annie Dillard (1974, 83)

• Yet's the time for being now, now, now.
  — Finnegans Wake, 250

• and history, which is yet to begin,
  will exceed this, exalt this
  as a poem erases and rewrites its poet.
  
  — Milton Acorn, ‘Knowing I Live in a Dark Age’

• Into deep darkness fall those who follow the immanent. Into deeper darkness fall those who follow the transcendent. He who knows both, with the immanent overcomes death and with the transcendent reaches immortality.
  — Mascaró, Isa Upanishad

• The next thing is. We are once amore as babes awondering in a wold made fresh where with the hen in the storyaboot we start from scratch.
  — Finnegans Wake, 336

• We still and always want waking.
  — Annie Dillard

• Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
  — Thoreau, Walden, chp. 18

• It is only by taking fresh looks at situations thought already to be understood that we come up with truly insightful and creative visions. The ability to reperceive, in short, is at the crux of creativity.
  — Hofstadter/FARG (1995, 308)

• The greatest carver does the least cutting.
  — Tao Te Ching 28 (Waley)

• The sun has his simple robe of light. The clouds are decked with gorgeousness.
  — Tagore

• However advanced we may be in ‘civilization’, which means artificiality, we always strive for artlessness; for it seems to be the goal and foundation of all artistic endeavours.
  — Suzuki (1956), 287

• One person's distraction is another's revelation—and vice versa.
  — gnox

• Every beast is driven to pasture by a blow.
  — Heraclitus

• From books and words come fantasy,
  And sometimes, from fantasy comes union.
  — Rúmí (Barks, 5)

• Poetry is a renovation of experience.
  — Wallace Stevens

• Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully.
  — Wallace Stevens

• Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
  — Sandburg

• The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
  — Jung

• A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.
  — Einstein

• … one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.
  — Einstein

• To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
  — Thoreau, Walden, chp. 2

• Take up thy twin roots and walk.
  — gnox

• Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
  — Thoreau, Walden, chp. 1

• As reassurance is the food of anxiety, entertainment is the food of depression.
  — G. Bateson

• Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.
  — Finnegans Wake, 259

• He who laughs, lasts.
  — anon

• The revelation of the Divine Reality hath everlastingly been identical with its concealment and its concealment identical with its revelation.
  — The Báb, 112

• The act of meaning the sacred text is collision and collusion with the limits of language.
  — gnox

• Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
  Through caverns measureless to man
  Down to a sunless sea.
  — Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’

• … the central literary tradition, like the river Alpheus, goes underground for long periods and resurfaces unpredictably.
  — Frye (1990, 49)

• Letting the days go by / let the water hold me down
  Letting the days go by / water flowing underground
  Into the blue again / after the money's gone
  Once in a lifetime / water flowing underground

  Same as it ever was …

  — Talking Heads, Remain in Light

• But give glad tidings to those who believe and work righteousness, that their portion is Gardens, beneath which rivers flow.
  — Qur'án 2:25 (Yusuf Ali)

• Beware lest ye be hindered by the veils of glory from partaking of the crystal waters of this living Fountain.
  — Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Aqdas ¶50

• The sacred text lies in the bed of the stream of consciousness.
  — gnox

• (Stoop) if you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs (please stoop), in this allaphbed!
  — Finnegans Wake, 18

• Drawing nearer to take our slant at it (since after all it has met with misfortune while all underground), let us see all there may remain to be seen.
  — Finnegans Wake, 113

• You can read the signs. You've been on this road before.
  — Laurie Anderson

• In ourselves the universe is revealed to itself as we are revealed in the universe.
  — Thomas Berry (1999, 32)

• Throughout the universe nothing has ever been concealed.
  — Dogen

• And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.
  — Revelation 6:14 (KJV)

• And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
  — Revelation 21:1 (KJV)

• The Greek word apocalypse means literally discovery, the uncovering or revelation (revealing) of what was hidden from consciousness—sometimes hidden because of our immersion in it.
  — gnox

• The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.
  — Wittgenstein (PI I.129)

• It is easier to discover another such a new world as Columbus did, than to go within one fold of this which we appear to know so well; the land is lost sight of, the compass varies, and mankind mutiny; and still history accumulates like rubbish before the portals of nature.
  — Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Bode 1964, 222)

• We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish.
  — source unknown

• To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
  — Orwell

• History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
  — Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Ulysses, 42

• Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the Apocalypse from himself.… The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared.
  — Frye (1982, 136, 138)

• Man does not reveal himself in his history, he struggles up through it.
  — Tagore

• What if we got together and gave that big gray bubble a kick?
  — Quito grafitto

• And one day you get that letter you've been waiting for forever. And everything it says is true. And then in the last line it says: Burn this.
  — Laurie Anderson

• The aim of all great spiritual traditions is to offer us relief from the dramas of self and history, to remind us that we are part of much grander projects than these.
  — Nisker 1998, 15

• The point is that the purpose of these conversations is to discover the ‘rules’. It's like life—a game whose purpose is to discover the rules, which rules are always changing and always undiscoverable.
  — G. Bateson (1972, 19-20)

• There is more to say, but not here.
  — G. Strawson (Gallagher and Shear 1999, 19)