Year 2008 Archive
Here we archive
“Here’s A Thought” items from the year 2008.
To return to the current year, click here.
Addional years’ archives are also accessible from the
same page.
December 28, 2008
Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.
December 21, 2008
Isolation exists only in isolation; once shared, it evaporates.
Josef Breuer
in the movie When Nietzsche Wept
December 14, 2008
Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
December 7, 2008
Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
November 30, 2008
We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do,
and more in the light of what they suffer.
November 23, 2008
Some things are true whether you believe them or not.
From the movie City of Angels
November 16, 2008
No matter how far you have gone on the wrong road, turn back.
Turkish Proverb
November 9, 2008
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
US President-elect Barack Obama
apparently quoting Hopi Elders
November 2, 2008
Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak;
and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws.
October 26, 2008
Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.
October 19, 2008
The Lord promises complete protection to those who love Him with all their body, heart, and soul. A devotee, totally absorbed in the Lord, may forget his own safety and security, but the Lord never forgets him. All men, no doubt, receive from the Lord what they need; but as long as they themselves think of their own welfare, they must earn it by their own effort. But the Lord Himself carries the necessaries of life to those who, lost in the thought of Him, cannot take care of themselves.
Commentary to the Gita
9:22
by Swami Nikhilananda
October 12, 2008
No room would be empty if your mind is full.
In the movie Little Buddha
October 5, 2008
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
September 28, 2008
I am now quite cured of seeking pleasure in society, be it country or town. A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself.
September 21, 2008
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
Happiness is the way, not the destination.
September 7, 2008
What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.
August 31, 2008
Very few men ask for the truth, fewer still dare to learn the truth, and the fewest dare to follow it in all its practical bearings.
August 24, 2008
Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
August 17, 2008
Wonderful methods of joining words, rhetorical powers, and explaining the texts of the books in various ways, are only for the enjoyment of the learned; they are not religion.
Sankara
quoted in Vivekananda - The Yogas …
August 10, 2008
I should not believe in a God who does not dance.
August 3, 2008
Until all of us have made it, none of us have made it.
July 27, 2008
Totus Tuus ego sum.
(I am totally Yours)
July 20, 2008
There are two kinds of light – the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
July 13, 2008
Everyone is as God has made him, and oftentimes a great deal worse.
July 6, 2008
Death might appear to be the issue of life,
Since for every three out of ten being born
Three out of ten are dying.
Then why
Should another three out of ten continue breeding death?
Because of sheer madness to multiply.
But there is one out of ten, they say, so sure of life
That tiger and wild bull keep clear of his inland path,
Weapons turn from him on the battle-field,
No bull-horn could tell where to gore him,
No tiger-claw where to tear him,
No weapon where to enter him.
And why?
Because he has no death to die.
Tao Te Ching,
#50
in The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu
by Witter Bynner
June 29, 2008
It’s never too late to do the right thing.
Jeff Key in Semper Fi
June 22, 2008
What you and I call life
– conditional or separative existence –
is not about doing things.
It is not even about doing things well.
It is about doing things together.
In a word, life is about relationship.
So, far better is it that you and I should come together
to do something, even ineptly,
than to have someone else do it perfectly,
and you and I never touch.
June 15, 2008
Ah, that restlessness is the whole thing. Whatever path you follow — whether you are a Hindu, a Mussalman, a Christian, a Sakta, a Vaishnava, or a Brahmo — the vital point is restlessness. God is our Inner Guide. It doesn’t matter if you take a wrong path — only you must be restless for Him. He Himself will put you on the right path.
June 8, 2008
Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.
June 1, 2008
Love is the religion, and the universe is the book.
Jalaluddin Rumi
in The
Essential Rumi
May 25, 2008
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready
to cope with;
all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be
possible.
May 18, 2008
Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds.
May 11, 2008
The pain then is part of the pleasure now.
That’s the deal.
Joy
Gresham
wife of C. S. Lewis
on the pain he will experience at her imminent death;
in Shadowlands
May 4, 2008
In religion itself there is nothing mysterious
to its author.
The mystery lies in the dimness of the human sight.
April 27, 2008
Speciesism – The assumption of superiority of humans over other animal species, especially to justify their exploitation.
Coined by Richard D. Ryder
April 20, 2008
Thank everyone who calls out your faults, your
anger, your impatience, your egotism;
do this consciously, voluntarily.
April 13, 2008
While we are contending for our own Liberty, we should be very cautious of violating the Rights of Conscience in others, ever considering that God alone is the Judge of the Hearts of men, and to him only in this Case, they are answerable.
George
Washington
quoted in Founding
Faith
April 6, 2008
I’d rather see a sermon than hear one any day; I’d rather one should walk with me than merely tell the way.
March 30, 2008
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.
March 23, 2008
If we had a clear vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
George
Eliot
(Mary Anne Evans)
March 16, 2008
Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine,
it is stranger than we can imagine.
March 9, 2008
Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending.
You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.
March 2, 2008
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only
to be understood.
Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
February 24, 2008
If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
February 17, 2008
I am determined that my children shall be brought
up in their father’s religion,
if they can find out what it is.
February 10, 2008
She passed through the midst of us without our knowing it, for who can see the comings and goings of a god, if the god does not wish to be seen?
Homer’s Odyssey,
Book X, lines 572-576
translated in prose by Samuel
Buter
February 3, 2008
Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone.
January 27, 2008
Do not be too quick to assume your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are a savage. Or perhaps he is afraid of you because he feels that you are afraid of him. And perhaps if he believed you are capable of loving him he would no longer be your enemy.
January 20, 2008
Then even nothingness was not, nor existence.
There was no air then, nor the heavens beyond it.
Who covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?
Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed? …
But, after all, who knows, and who can say
Whence it all came, and how creation happened?
The gods themselves are later than creation,
So who knows truly whence it had arisen?
Whence all creation had its origin,
He, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
He, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
He knows — or maybe even he does not know.
Hymn of Creation
Rig Veda, X, 129
quoted in part in Discovering
God
January 13, 2007
The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind.
January 6, 2007
What you are will tell you of Itself.
