August 2012
“You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh
“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.
To be natural is to be obvious,
and to be obvious is to be inartistic.” —Oscar Wilde
To be natural is to be obvious,
and to be obvious is to be inartistic.” —Oscar Wilde
“What you seek is seeking you.”
—Rumi
“The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice.”
—Peggy O’Mara
“I offer you peace. I offer you love. I offer you friendship. I see your beauty. I hear your need. I feel your feelings. My wisdom flows from the highest Source. I salute that Source in you. Let us work together. For unity and peace.”
—Gandhi’s Prayer for Peace
“My actions are my only true belongings.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh
“You may think I’m small, but I have a universe in my head.”
—Yoko Ono
“If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.”
—Vincent Van Gogh
“Wenn die Zurückhaltung macht, dass man bei jeder Meinung beharrt, so ist sie schlecht, wenn sie einen z. B. auch bei einer falschen Meinung beharren lässt.”
—Aristoteles, Nikomachische Ethik, 1145a
Mir reicht's! Ich geh schaukeln.
To someone who said to him, ‘The Sinopeans have condemned you to exile,’ Diogenes replied, ‘Yes, and I’ve condemned them to stay where they are.’
Diogenes of Sinope (as reported by Diogenes Laertius)
“Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.”
—The Dalai Lama
[N]ot the status, but the intention, of the one who bestows is what counts. Virtue closes the door to no man; it is open to all, admits all, invites all, the freeborn and the freedman, the slave and the king, and the exile; neither family nor fortune determines its choice—it is satisfied with the naked human being.
Seneca, De Beneficiis, Book III
Animals conscious say leading neuroscientists →
mindhacks.com
A group of leading neuroscientists has used a conference at Cambridge University to make an official declaration recognising consciousness in animals.
The declaration was made at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference and signed by some of the leading lights in consciousness research, including Christof Koch and David Edelman.
You can read the full text as a pdf file, however, the main part of the declaration reads:
We declare the following: “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non- human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”
You can also see all of the talks on the conference’s webpage. Curiously, physicist Stephen Hawking was there and the declaration was signed in his presence.
“There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.”
—Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things
“It’s in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous.”
—Brené Brown
“Many people spend their entire lives doing things they don’t really care for” and “endure their lives” says reknowned creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson in a talk for the School of Life on finding our purpose and following our passion. Robinson—who is known for speaking out against our highly standardized, one-size-fits-all education system that follows a “linear mode of production” and steers workers toward filling slots at companies so our economy can “beat China”—says the problem with this system is that humans are hard wired to use our imaginations and produce new things. When we find ourselves doing things we aren’t passionate about, we are, unsurprisingly, pretty miserable.”
—Why Schools Should Help Students Find Their Passion - Education - GOOD
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” —Dylan Thomas
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” —Dylan Thomas
“Writing is a form of therapy; how do all those who do not write, compose, or paint manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in the human condition?”
—Graham Greene
“I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
—Stephen Jay Gould
“
Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.
“Discovering other’ weaknesses is not going to prove your strength. We all have weaknesses…The friend is the one who goes out to strengthen this weakness, but not to attack it.”
—Anaïs Nin
If you can correctly pronounce every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world. After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he'd prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud. Try them yourself.
“You will fall in love with someone who’s cold and always seemingly pushing you away. When all is said and done, they will be forever known as the one person you couldn’t get to love you. Unfortunately, it will hurt and sting worse than the good ones, the ones that chopped up your meat for you and picked out an eyelash from your eye and were nice to your mother, because love often feels like a game we need to win. And when we lose, when we realize we couldn’t get what we ultimately desired from a person, it makes us feel like a failure and erases all the memories of those who loved us in the past. It’s a permanent smudge on your love resume.”
—The types of people you will fall in love with in your 20s
“People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
“
When you’re feeling down, it’s so tempting to focus on your sadness: you wonder why you’re sad, you hate that you’re sad, you wish you weren’t sad. It’s completely natural to do this. But it’s the wrong way to be. No matter how smart you are— you will never change a bad mood by thinking about it. You will only magnify it.
Instead focus on your behavior. Focus on what you can change. Go outside. Exercise. Quit isolating yourself. Interact with friends and family. Accomplish things. Your mind will reward you with happiness.
It is so tough to change your behavior if you are feeling depressed. But it’s the only way. Don’t say: “I’ll act differently when I feel better.”
Act differently, and you will feel better.
” —
“Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
—Mark Twain
“When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert
“It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.”
—Ram Dass
