It’s one of nature’s ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.
~ Igor Stravinsky
(Father Knows Best: Words That Celebrate the World’s Most Wonderful Dads)
When we know about our ancestors, when we sense them as living and as supporting us, then we feel connected to the genetic life-stream, and we draw strength and nourishment from this.
~ Philip Carr-Gomm
(Druid Mysteries: Ancient Wisdom for the 21st Century)
When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.
~ W. Somerset Maugham
(Of Human Bondage)
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!
~ Henry David Thoreau
(Walden)
Science tends more and more to reveal to us the unity that underlies the diversity of nature. We must have diversity in our practical lives; we must seize Nature by many handles. But our intellectual lives demand unity, demand simplicity amid all this complexity. Our religious lives demand the same. Amid all the diversity of creeds and sects we are coming more and more to see that religion is one, that verbal differences and ceremonies are unimportant, and that the fundamental agreements are alone significant. Religion as a key or passport to some other world has had its day; as a mere set of statements or dogmas about the Infinite mystery it has had its day. Science makes us more and more at home in this world, and is coming more and more, to the intuitional mind, to have a religious value. Science kills credulity and superstition but to the well-balanced mind it enhances the feeling of wonder, of veneration, and of kinship which we feel in the presence of the marvelous universe. It quiets our fears and apprehensions, it pours oil upon the troubled waters of our lives, and reconciles us to the world as it is.
~ John Burroughs
(Accepting the Universe)
Gain knowledge, brothers! Think and read,
And to your neighbors’ gifts pay heed,
Yet do not thus neglect your own.
Sadly I weep when I recall
The unforgotten deeds of all
Our ancestors: their toilsome deeds!
Could I forget their pangs and needs,
I, as my price, would then suppress
Half of my own life’s happiness…
~ Taras Shevchenko
(My Friendly Epistle)
Quite often, as life goes on, when we feel completely secure as we go on our way, we suddenly notice that we are trapped in error, that we have allowed ourselves to be taken in by individuals, by objects, have dreamt up an affinity with them which immediately vanishes before our waking eye; and yet we cannot tear ourselves away, held fast by some power that seems incomprehensible to us. Sometimes, however, we become fully aware and realize that error as well as truth can move and spur us on to action.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(Maxims & Reflections)
A word is dead, when it is said
Some say –
I say it just begins to live
That day
~ Emily Dickinson
(The Poems of Emily Dickinson, #278)
It’s very difficult to explain the effect the first blues record I heard had on me, except to say that I recognized it immediately. It was as if I were being reintroduced to something that I already knew, maybe from another, earlier life. For me there is something primitively soothing about this music, and it went straight to my nervous system, making me feel ten feet tall.
~ Eric Clapton
(Clapton: The Autobiography)
And a third gift from Val Erde – thanks ever so much, Val!
One sweet world
Around this star is spinning
One sweet world
And in her breath I’m swimming
And here we will rest in peace
~ Dave Matthews
♫ (One Sweet World) ♫
The earth itself assures us it is a living entity. Deep below surface one can hear its slow pulse, feel its vibrant rhythm. The great breathing mountains expand and contract. The vast sage desert undulates with almost imperceptible tides like the oceans. From the very beginning, throughout all its cataclysmic upthrusts and deep sea submergences, the planet Earth seems to have maintained an ordered rhythm.
~ Frank Waters
(Mountain Dialogues)
Here is the test of wisdom,
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,
Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,
Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things,
and the excellence of things;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.
~ Walt Whitman
(Meditations of Walt Whitman: Earth, My Likeness)