Signposts » awareness

It Is Only Our Bad Temper…

CowPi — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 11:14:54 +0000

It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.

— C.S. Lewis <link>

Nothing is worth more…

CowPi — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:46:56 +0000

Nothing is worth more than this day.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe <link>

A Momentary Taste of Being

CowPi — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:52:28 +0000

A Moment’s Halt—a momentary taste
Of Being from the Well amid the Waste—
And Lo!—the phantom Caravan has reach’d
The Nothing it set out from—Oh, make haste!

— Omar Khayyam, from The Rubaiyat, XLVIII, tr. Edward Fitzgerald <link>

He who binds to himself a joy…

CowPi — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:34:33 +0000

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternityâ€™s sun rise.

— William Blake <link>

A Question of Experience

CowPi — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 02:13:00 +0000

A Question of Experience

To me, the God issue is a question of experience. For example, I want people I love not to die; I want friendships that are not betrayed; I want justice—desires that seem to make no sense, that appear in fact to be irrational…. There is, I admit, a certain uselessness to this, in terms of the fact that nothing in the world seems to correspond with or answer these desires. All that I ask of myself, and I think it is reasonable to ask everybody else, is to be faithful to that experience and to explore the implications of it. And if something is found that explains it, so that the question disappears, then fine, thatâ€™s the answer, and thatâ€™s that.

— Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, from discussion panel “Faith & Science” from World Science Festival, 2008 <link>

The great majority of mankind are satisfied…

CowPi — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:16:29 +0000

The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances as though they were realities.

— Machiavelli (via) <link>

No man is allowed to be a judge in…

CowPi — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:08:08 +0000

No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.

— James Madison (via) <link>

Soon silence will have passed into legend…

CowPi — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 04:02:44 +0000

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation… tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.

— Jean Arp <link>

This glass of which you speak will always be…

CowPi — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:43:16 +0000

Unless you are in a vacuum, this glass of which you speak will always be full, half of liquid, half of air, no matter your level of ignorance.

— Author unknown <link>

To Be Convert…

CowPi — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:22:17 +0000

To Be Converted

“To be converted” means to follow Jesus, to walk with him, on his way. But let us again insist on the fact that God “brings us back,” converts us. Conversion is not human self-realization, and man is not the architect of his own life. Conversion consists essentially in that decision by which man ceases to be his own creator, ceases to seek his own self and his self-realization, but accepts his dependence on the true Creator, on creative love, accepts that his dependence is true freedom and that the freedom of autonomy emancipated from the Creator is not freedom but illusion, deception.

— Pope Benedict XVI, from book Journey to Easter <link>

I can only give you a road…

CowPi — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:00:52 +0000

I can’t help you; I can only give you a road.

— Chen Si, suicide watcher on Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge (via from source) <link>

Think of them as “Users”…

CowPi — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 05:47:32 +0000

Don’t think of them as “Customers” or “Patrons”, think of them as “Users”. Whatever thing you’re selling, it’s not what it does that’s interesting; it’s how people use it that’s interesting. “People Matter. Objects Don’t.” Exactly.

— Hugh MacLeod paraphrasing Kathy Sierra (via) <link>