The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
-Carl Sagan
Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.
-Carl Sagan
“I’m afraid I can’t be counted among those who’ve latched onto the Goddess as a politically correct alternative to God the Father. The Transcendent Principle–the Divine, if you will–is no more wholly female than it is wholly male.
“To be sure, the Divine has feminine aspects and masculine aspects, but its cumulative aspects transcend gender and, indeed, are so far beyond definition or description that they can’t even be rationally discussed.
“It’s the Mystery, baby, and the Mystery is ultimately unknowable. We can interface with it, we can marvel at it, we can connect to it and be elevated by it, but we can never comprehend it.
“What really interests me about the Goddess is the fact that while she was beloved and honored by our ancestors, was the central spiritual archetype and prevailing deity all over the globe for thousands of years, she has been so successfully eradicated by revisionist patriarchal spin doctors that most modern Christians, Moslems and Jews are totally ignorant of her massive and dominant historical presence.
“If someone or something of that enormous scope can be so thoroughly concealed from the masses, it can’t help but call into question everything we’ve been taught by our various institutions.
“The subversion and repression of the Goddess is the Big Lie of the past two millennia — and as the dumbing down of America gains momentum, the duplicity is strengthening its grip.
“The good news is that a significant minority has recently become informed about the Goddess, and that has both revealed the essential spiritual foundation of feminism and inspired a growing distrust of traditional dogma and the meatballs who’ve propagated it.”
–Tom Robbins
In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems.
-Rumi
…lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and … stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to “walk about” into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?
-Wassily Kandinsky
The moon is at her full, and riding high,
Floods the calm fields with light.
The airs that hover in the summer sky
Are all asleep tonight.-William C. Bryant
Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the ‘creative bug’ is just a wee voice telling you, “I’d like my crayons back, please.”
-Hugh MacLeod
I experimented and drew with my non-dominant (right) hand.
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.
-Martha Graham
I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.
-Jules Verne
The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
-Kurt Vonnegut
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats.
-Proverb
Your heart is full of fertile seeds, waiting to sprout. Just as a lotus flower springs from the mire to bloom splendidly, the interaction of the cosmic breath causes the flower of the spirit to bloom and bear fruit in this world.
-Morihei Ueshiba
Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.-Kahlil Gibran
Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant? I’m halfway through my fishburger and I realize, Oh my God. I could be eating a slow learner…
-Lynda Montgomery
The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.
–Carl Sandburg
We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.
-Robert Frost
The questions worth asking, in other words, come not from other people but from nature, and are for the most part delicate things easily drowned out by the noise of everyday life.
-Robert B. Laughlin
If you are interested in something, you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it. Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.
-Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi