Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Happiness

Week 30

What is human happiness? Can you say you are happy simply because you have a lot of money, even enough to adorn yourself with diamonds? You can find true happiness only when you laugh, sing, and whisper together with your spouse, both of you enraptured in love.

---Sun Myung Moon

Sunday, July 26, 2009

The Importance of Stooping

Week 29

When people say I am wise, or a sage, I cannot accept it. A man once dipped a hatful of water from a stream. What did that amount to? I am not that stream. I am at the stream, but I do nothing. Other people are at the same stream, but most of them find they have to do something with it. I do nothing. I never think that I am the one who must see to it that cherries grow on stalks. I stand and behold, admiring what nature can do.

There is a fine old story about a student who came to a rabbi and said, "In the olden days there were men who saw the face of God. why don't they any more?" The rabbi replied, "Because nowadays no one can stoop so low."

One must stoop a little in order to fetch water from the stream.
---Carl Jung


Weekly Quotes Archive

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Love as an Orientation of Character

Week 28

Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one "object" of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.
--Erich Fromm

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Rich Intellectual Life

Week 27
In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. There were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.
--Viktor Frankl

Family of Walkers

Week 26
No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of Walkers.
--Henry David Thoreau

Perfect Sweetness

Week 25
The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps in perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson