I am often asked how I was able to get around several East European countries for several years without speaking each of the languages. That is a good question.
Much of what is communicated when speaking is actually visual. Facial expressions, hand gestures, body language do a great deal in expressing what is being said. As such, I got pretty good at anticipating questions, punchlines, and offers (inter alia). That isn't to say that I didn't pick up some of each language (or completely fail to understand) but overall, I was able to rely on my increasingly honed skill of 'watching to hear'.
Although I must confess, in Bulgaria, this was sometimes a bit trickier.
For an example of this, below is a "French" language discussion of a flying machine (yes, it's a flying sheep). I'm sure you can figure exactly what is being said without understanding a word. Enjoy.
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So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings. When that is done successfully, then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.- Robert Pirsig
I'd rather be riding
So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings. When that is done successfully, then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.- Robert Pirsig
Other places to go...
Currently Employed
I am currently a Research Fellow in Nuffield College at the University of Oxford as part of the EUREQUAL team.
International Philosophy Football Match
Football Commentator: Archimedes out to Socrates, Socrates back to Archimedes, Archimedes out to Heraclitus, he beats Hegel. Heraclitus a little flick, here he comes on the far post, Socrates is there, Socrates heads it in! Socrates has scored!
The Greeks are going mad, the Greeks are going mad. Socrates scores, got a beautiful cross from Archimedes.
The Germans are disputing it. Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside.
Collected Ideas
I made the wrong mistakes. - Thelonious Monk
For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself. From within, I couldn’t decide what to do. Unable to see, I heard my name being called. Then I walked outside.- Jelaluddin Rumi
If you want to be happy, be. - Leo Tolstoy
Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.- Ludwig Borne
It is the friends you can call up at 4am that matter.
Entering the forest without moving the grass; entering the water without raising a ripple.- Zen saying
Don’t listen to those who say, “It’s not done that way.”…Don’t listen to those who say, “You’re taking too big a chance.” Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor, and it would surely be rubbed out by today.- Neil Simon
Thinking is greatly under-rated as a form of exercise.- James A. Loveless
Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.- Samuel Langhorne Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain)
It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.
As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to live it more and more.- Jules Renard
There isn’t any formula or method. You learn to love by loving…- Aldous Huxley
You can observe a lot just by watching.
When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough. When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much.- Fen-Yang
What is a rebel? A man who says no.- Albert Camus
If you are not happy here and now, you never will be.- Taisen Deshimaru
If you don’t want any to know it, don’t do it.- Chinese proverb
What a wonderful life I’ve had. I only wish I realized it sooner.- Colette
It is usually not considered an adventure when it is happening.- PML
If you wish to know what a man is, place him in authority.- Yugoslav proverb
It is easy to get everything you want, provided you first learn to do without the things you cannot get.- Elbert Hubbard
Whatever needs to be maintained by force is doomed.- Henry Miller
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.- Abraham Maslow
As an artist, all I need is my paints and brushes – and someone to drag me away when the canvas is done.- Pablo Picasso
Love…is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.- Iris Murdoch
Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.- Italian proverb
Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of other, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.- Katherine Mansfield
Education consists of example and love - and nothing else.Be happy. It is a way of being wise.- Colette
A good education should leave much to be desired.- Alan Gregg
I’m going to memorize your name and throw my head away.- Oscar Levant
Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Grub first, then ethics.- Bertolt Brecht
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are crazy.- Rebecca West
Hell is other people.- Jean-Paul Sartre
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.- Oscar Wilde
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we know what to do with it.- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our life is frittered away by detail…Simplify, simplify, simplify.- Henry David Thoreau
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.- H. L. Mencken
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.- Albert Einstein
Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?- Stanislaw Lem
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.- Abraham Lincoln
Two monologues do not make a dialogue.
The difficulty in life is the choice.- George Moore
Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal. A parable.- Friedrich Nietzsche
We are like someone immersed in water, who complains of nothing to drink.- Hsueh-Feng
To be uncertain is uncomfortable, but to be certain is ridiculous.- Chinese proverb
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.- Sir Winston Churchill
Life is a great bundle of little things.- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.- Aristotle
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.- Alan Watts
For this is the journey that men make: to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn’t matter much what else they find.- James A. Michener
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.- Oscar Wilde
Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.- Dogen
It’s taken me all my life to understand that it is not necessary to understand everything.- René Coty
Nothing is so simple that it cannot be misunderstood.- Freeman Teague
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.- Robert Green Ingersoll
He who knows speaks not; he who speaks, knows not.- Lao-Tzu
Sometimes it proves the highest understanding not to understand.- Gracian
Have more than thou showest; speak less than thou knowest.- William Shakespeare
I am still learning.- Michelangelo
It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.- John Wooden
To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.- Chinese proverb
Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them … there is nothing.- Jean-Paul Sartre
It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.- P. D. Ouspensky
Great things are done when men and mountains meet; this is not done by jostling in the street.- William Blake
I have realized that the past and the future are real illusion, that they exist only in the present, which is what there is and all that there is.- Alan Watts
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.- Shunryu Suzuki
A wise man’s question contains half the answer.- Ibn Gabirol
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.- André Gide
Each day a day goes by.- Carlo Goldoni
Forever is composed of nows.- Emily Dickinson
If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where do you expect to find it?- Dogen
Don’t listen to what they say. Go see.- Chinese proverb
No one shows a child the sky.- African proverb
Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists of putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.- Hermann Hesse
The truth is generally seen, rarely heard.- Gracian
Things are not what they seem to be, nor are they otherwise.- The Lankavatara Sutra
Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass.- Hermann Melville
The things we know best are the things we haven’t been taught.- Luc de Clapiers de Vauvenargues
You cannot enter a place you never left.- Zen saying
Osborn’s Law: Variables won’t; constants aren’t.
The quest for certainty blocks the quest for meaning.- Erich Fromm
Love is the answer, but while you’re waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.- Woody Allen
A fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees.- William Blake
Through the bamboo forest is dense, water flows through it freely.- Zen saying
All religions pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking into the distance.- V. V. Rozanov
No answer is also an answer.- German proverb
Just get rid of the false and you will automatically realize the true.- Ho-Shan
Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be.- Aldous Huxley
I don’t know. I don’t care. And it doesn’t make any difference.- Jack Kerouac
The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but the transference of bones from one graveyard to another.- Frank J. Dobie
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.- Joseph Heller
Other than to amuse himself, why should a man pretend to know where he’s going or to understand what he sees?- William Least Heat-Moon
We spend our lived telling ourselves the story of past and future, while the reality of the present goes largely unexplored.
I want to make my own mistakes, not other people’s.- John Cleese
Make time to for what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life. By this I mean the thing that lies behind all great careers, from Shakespeare to Abraham Lincoln’s, and as far back as there are books to read – the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not ‘happiness’ and ‘pleasure’ but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything for anything you want to do.
- Jean Paul Sartre
The ordinary man looks outward.
- Zen saying
Each day should be passed as though it were our last.
- Publilius Syrus
It is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it.
- W. Somerset Maugham
You must be the change you wish to see in the world
- Mahatma Gandhi
Man’s most serious activity is play.
- George Santayana
Measure a thousand times and cut once.
- Turkish proverb
The sinning is the best part of repentance.
- Arabic proverb
If we did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.
- Thomas Edison
He has half the deed done, who has made a beginning.
- Horace
How many cares once loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.
Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.
- Hermann Hesse
Just as greed for worldly things is inhibiting and self-defeating, so also craving for other-worldly things prevents the opening of the mind
- Muso Kokushi
A superior vessel takes a long time to complete.
- Zen proverb
One may go a long way after one is tired.
- French proverb
I have a simple philosophy. Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. And scratch where it itches.
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
- Abraham Lincoln
Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
- Sir Winston Churchill
You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.
- Indira Gandhi
No call alligator long-mouth until you pass him by.
- Jamaican proverb
A truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.
- William Blake
Happiness is a how, not a what; a talent, not an object.
- Hermann Hesse
It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too.
- Henry W. Shaw
Hide not your talents, they for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?
- Benjamin Franklin
May you live all the days of your life.
- Jonathon Swift
Love does not consist on gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Nothing prevents our being natural so much as the desire to appear so.
- La Rochefoucauld
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Always carry a flagon of whiskey on case of snakebite, and furthermore always carry a small snake.
- W. C. Fields
I used to think that anyone doing anything weird was weird. I suddenly realized that anyone doing anything weird wasn’t weird at all and that it was the people saying they were weird that were weird.
- Paul McCartney
Expenditure rises to meet income.
- C. Northcote Parkinson
Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.
- Sydney Smith
I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
- Jerome K. Jerome
The wealthy man is the man who is much, not the man who has much.
- Karl Marx
Humor is the poetry of ideas that do not match.
There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way.
- Christopher Morley
He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh.
- The Koran
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
- Lin Yutang
When you win, nothing hurts.
- Joe Namath
In Maine we have a saying that there’s no point in speaking unless you can improve on silence.
- Edmund Muskie
There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and after that to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
- Logan Pearsall Smith
Act without doing, work without effort.
- Tao Te Ching
The greatest thing in the world is to know hoe to be one’s own self.
- Montaigne
People wish to be settled. Only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
How refreshing the whinny of a packhorse unloaded of everything.
- Zen saying
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
- Alfred North Whitehead
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
- William James
To know her is to love her.
- Samuel Rogers
When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.
- Shunryu Suzuki
It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
- Oscar Wilde
There is no great genius without some touch of madness.
- Seneca
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves to be like other people.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
What, at this moment, is lacking?
- Lin-Chi
A good meal ought to being with hunger.
- French proverb
Better bend than break.
The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one’s whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises.
- C. G. Jung
Courage is doing what you’re afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you’re scared.
- Eddie Rickenbacker
Think enough and you won’t know anything.
- Kenneth Patchen
He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.
- Tao Te Ching
Think with the whole body.
- Taisen Deshimaru
1. Out of clutter, find simplicity.
2. From discord, find harmony.
3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
- Albert Einstein
We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one else can spare us…
- Marcel Proust
What you must dare is to be yourself.
- Dag Hammarskjöld
If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.
- Henry Miller
The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.
- Jesus
Look within, thou art the Buddha.
- The Buddha
Dare to be naïve.
- R. Buckminster Fuller
Don’t Compromise yourself. You are all you’ve got.
- Janis Joplin
No man is a failure who is enjoying life.
Catch the vigorous horse of your mind.
- Zen saying
There are moments when everything goes well; don’t be frightened, it won’t last.
- Jules Renard
Fools look to tomorrow, wise men use tonight.
- Scottish proverb
See as if for the first time a beautiful person or an ordinary object.
- Shiva
I have learned silence from the talkative; tolerance from the intolerant; and kindness from the unkind.
- Kahlil Gibran
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.
- Evelyn Waugh
True strength is delicate.
You never really lose until you quit trying.
- Mike Ditka
The true leader is always led.
- C. G. Jung
For others to approve me is easy; for me to approve myself is hard.
- Zen saying
Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right use of strength.
The sun will set without thy assistance.
- The Talmud
Sooner or later, you’ve heard about all that your bests friends have to say. Then comes the tolerance of real love.
Work before play, but always play.
- PML
Circumstances are the creators of most men’s opinions.
Don’t confuse conceit for pride.
Don’t confuse knowledge with wisdom.
Don’t confuse talking with conversation.
Don’t confuse feelings for truth.
Don’t confuse movement with progress.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when it came to die, discover that I had not lived.
- Henry David Thoreau
Some are born to move the world to live their fantasies; most of us just dream about the things we’d like to be.
- Neil Peart
The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.
- William James
The aim of living is life itself.
- Goethe
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
- Aart van der Leeuw
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life…I think that what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually dell the rapture of being alive.
- Joseph Campbell
For years, copying other people, I tried to know myself. From within, I couldn’t decide what to do. Unable to see, I heard my name being called. Then I walked outside.- Jelaluddin Rumi
If you want to be happy, be. - Leo Tolstoy
Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth.- Ludwig Borne
It is the friends you can call up at 4am that matter.
Entering the forest without moving the grass; entering the water without raising a ripple.- Zen saying
Don’t listen to those who say, “It’s not done that way.”…Don’t listen to those who say, “You’re taking too big a chance.” Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor, and it would surely be rubbed out by today.- Neil Simon
Thinking is greatly under-rated as a form of exercise.- James A. Loveless
Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.- Samuel Langhorne Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain)
It is almost as important to know what is not serious as to know what is.
As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to live it more and more.- Jules Renard
There isn’t any formula or method. You learn to love by loving…- Aldous Huxley
You can observe a lot just by watching.
When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough. When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much.- Fen-Yang
What is a rebel? A man who says no.- Albert Camus
If you are not happy here and now, you never will be.- Taisen Deshimaru
If you don’t want any to know it, don’t do it.- Chinese proverb
What a wonderful life I’ve had. I only wish I realized it sooner.- Colette
It is usually not considered an adventure when it is happening.- PML
If you wish to know what a man is, place him in authority.- Yugoslav proverb
It is easy to get everything you want, provided you first learn to do without the things you cannot get.- Elbert Hubbard
Whatever needs to be maintained by force is doomed.- Henry Miller
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.- Abraham Maslow
As an artist, all I need is my paints and brushes – and someone to drag me away when the canvas is done.- Pablo Picasso
Love…is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.- Iris Murdoch
Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.- Italian proverb
Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of other, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.- Katherine Mansfield
Education consists of example and love - and nothing else.Be happy. It is a way of being wise.- Colette
A good education should leave much to be desired.- Alan Gregg
I’m going to memorize your name and throw my head away.- Oscar Levant
Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Grub first, then ethics.- Bertolt Brecht
The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are crazy.- Rebecca West
Hell is other people.- Jean-Paul Sartre
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.- Oscar Wilde
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we know what to do with it.- Ralph Waldo Emerson
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our life is frittered away by detail…Simplify, simplify, simplify.- Henry David Thoreau
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.- H. L. Mencken
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.- Albert Einstein
Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?- Stanislaw Lem
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.- Abraham Lincoln
Two monologues do not make a dialogue.
The difficulty in life is the choice.- George Moore
Not every end is a goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal. A parable.- Friedrich Nietzsche
We are like someone immersed in water, who complains of nothing to drink.- Hsueh-Feng
To be uncertain is uncomfortable, but to be certain is ridiculous.- Chinese proverb
Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.- Sir Winston Churchill
Life is a great bundle of little things.- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.- Aristotle
Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.- Alan Watts
For this is the journey that men make: to find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn’t matter much what else they find.- James A. Michener
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.- Oscar Wilde
Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.- Dogen
It’s taken me all my life to understand that it is not necessary to understand everything.- René Coty
Nothing is so simple that it cannot be misunderstood.- Freeman Teague
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.- Robert Green Ingersoll
He who knows speaks not; he who speaks, knows not.- Lao-Tzu
Sometimes it proves the highest understanding not to understand.- Gracian
Have more than thou showest; speak less than thou knowest.- William Shakespeare
I am still learning.- Michelangelo
It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.- John Wooden
To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.- Chinese proverb
Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them … there is nothing.- Jean-Paul Sartre
It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.- P. D. Ouspensky
Great things are done when men and mountains meet; this is not done by jostling in the street.- William Blake
I have realized that the past and the future are real illusion, that they exist only in the present, which is what there is and all that there is.- Alan Watts
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.- Shunryu Suzuki
A wise man’s question contains half the answer.- Ibn Gabirol
Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.- André Gide
Each day a day goes by.- Carlo Goldoni
Forever is composed of nows.- Emily Dickinson
If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where do you expect to find it?- Dogen
Don’t listen to what they say. Go see.- Chinese proverb
No one shows a child the sky.- African proverb
Seriousness is an accident of time. It consists of putting too high a value on time. In eternity there is no time. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.- Hermann Hesse
The truth is generally seen, rarely heard.- Gracian
Things are not what they seem to be, nor are they otherwise.- The Lankavatara Sutra
Faith and philosophy are air, but events are brass.- Hermann Melville
The things we know best are the things we haven’t been taught.- Luc de Clapiers de Vauvenargues
You cannot enter a place you never left.- Zen saying
Osborn’s Law: Variables won’t; constants aren’t.
The quest for certainty blocks the quest for meaning.- Erich Fromm
Love is the answer, but while you’re waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.- Woody Allen
A fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees.- William Blake
Through the bamboo forest is dense, water flows through it freely.- Zen saying
All religions pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking into the distance.- V. V. Rozanov
No answer is also an answer.- German proverb
Just get rid of the false and you will automatically realize the true.- Ho-Shan
Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be.- Aldous Huxley
I don’t know. I don’t care. And it doesn’t make any difference.- Jack Kerouac
The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but the transference of bones from one graveyard to another.- Frank J. Dobie
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.- Joseph Heller
Other than to amuse himself, why should a man pretend to know where he’s going or to understand what he sees?- William Least Heat-Moon
We spend our lived telling ourselves the story of past and future, while the reality of the present goes largely unexplored.
I want to make my own mistakes, not other people’s.- John Cleese
Make time to for what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life. By this I mean the thing that lies behind all great careers, from Shakespeare to Abraham Lincoln’s, and as far back as there are books to read – the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not ‘happiness’ and ‘pleasure’ but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything for anything you want to do.
- Jean Paul Sartre
The ordinary man looks outward.
- Zen saying
Each day should be passed as though it were our last.
- Publilius Syrus
It is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it.
- W. Somerset Maugham
You must be the change you wish to see in the world
- Mahatma Gandhi
Man’s most serious activity is play.
- George Santayana
Measure a thousand times and cut once.
- Turkish proverb
The sinning is the best part of repentance.
- Arabic proverb
If we did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.
- Thomas Edison
He has half the deed done, who has made a beginning.
- Horace
How many cares once loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.
Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.
- Hermann Hesse
Just as greed for worldly things is inhibiting and self-defeating, so also craving for other-worldly things prevents the opening of the mind
- Muso Kokushi
A superior vessel takes a long time to complete.
- Zen proverb
One may go a long way after one is tired.
- French proverb
I have a simple philosophy. Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. And scratch where it itches.
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
- Abraham Lincoln
Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
- Sir Winston Churchill
You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.
- Indira Gandhi
No call alligator long-mouth until you pass him by.
- Jamaican proverb
A truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.
- William Blake
Happiness is a how, not a what; a talent, not an object.
- Hermann Hesse
It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too.
- Henry W. Shaw
Hide not your talents, they for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?
- Benjamin Franklin
May you live all the days of your life.
- Jonathon Swift
Love does not consist on gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Nothing prevents our being natural so much as the desire to appear so.
- La Rochefoucauld
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Always carry a flagon of whiskey on case of snakebite, and furthermore always carry a small snake.
- W. C. Fields
I used to think that anyone doing anything weird was weird. I suddenly realized that anyone doing anything weird wasn’t weird at all and that it was the people saying they were weird that were weird.
- Paul McCartney
Expenditure rises to meet income.
- C. Northcote Parkinson
Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.
- Sydney Smith
I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
- Jerome K. Jerome
The wealthy man is the man who is much, not the man who has much.
- Karl Marx
Humor is the poetry of ideas that do not match.
There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way.
- Christopher Morley
He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh.
- The Koran
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
- Lin Yutang
When you win, nothing hurts.
- Joe Namath
In Maine we have a saying that there’s no point in speaking unless you can improve on silence.
- Edmund Muskie
There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and after that to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
- Logan Pearsall Smith
Act without doing, work without effort.
- Tao Te Ching
The greatest thing in the world is to know hoe to be one’s own self.
- Montaigne
People wish to be settled. Only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
How refreshing the whinny of a packhorse unloaded of everything.
- Zen saying
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
- Alfred North Whitehead
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
- William James
To know her is to love her.
- Samuel Rogers
When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.
- Shunryu Suzuki
It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
- Oscar Wilde
There is no great genius without some touch of madness.
- Seneca
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves to be like other people.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
What, at this moment, is lacking?
- Lin-Chi
A good meal ought to being with hunger.
- French proverb
Better bend than break.
The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one’s whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises.
- C. G. Jung
Courage is doing what you’re afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you’re scared.
- Eddie Rickenbacker
Think enough and you won’t know anything.
- Kenneth Patchen
He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.
- Tao Te Ching
Think with the whole body.
- Taisen Deshimaru
1. Out of clutter, find simplicity.
2. From discord, find harmony.
3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
- Albert Einstein
We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one else can spare us…
- Marcel Proust
What you must dare is to be yourself.
- Dag Hammarskjöld
If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.
- Henry Miller
The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.
- Jesus
Look within, thou art the Buddha.
- The Buddha
Dare to be naïve.
- R. Buckminster Fuller
Don’t Compromise yourself. You are all you’ve got.
- Janis Joplin
No man is a failure who is enjoying life.
Catch the vigorous horse of your mind.
- Zen saying
There are moments when everything goes well; don’t be frightened, it won’t last.
- Jules Renard
Fools look to tomorrow, wise men use tonight.
- Scottish proverb
See as if for the first time a beautiful person or an ordinary object.
- Shiva
I have learned silence from the talkative; tolerance from the intolerant; and kindness from the unkind.
- Kahlil Gibran
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them.
- Evelyn Waugh
True strength is delicate.
You never really lose until you quit trying.
- Mike Ditka
The true leader is always led.
- C. G. Jung
For others to approve me is easy; for me to approve myself is hard.
- Zen saying
Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right use of strength.
The sun will set without thy assistance.
- The Talmud
Sooner or later, you’ve heard about all that your bests friends have to say. Then comes the tolerance of real love.
Work before play, but always play.
- PML
Circumstances are the creators of most men’s opinions.
Don’t confuse conceit for pride.
Don’t confuse knowledge with wisdom.
Don’t confuse talking with conversation.
Don’t confuse feelings for truth.
Don’t confuse movement with progress.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when it came to die, discover that I had not lived.
- Henry David Thoreau
Some are born to move the world to live their fantasies; most of us just dream about the things we’d like to be.
- Neil Peart
The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.
- William James
The aim of living is life itself.
- Goethe
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
- Aart van der Leeuw
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life…I think that what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually dell the rapture of being alive.
- Joseph Campbell
Bill Hicks suggests....
Today a man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we’re an imagination of ourselves.
Now, here’s Tom with the weather....
Now, here’s Tom with the weather....
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