Moments Of Clarity
An ongoing list of favorite quotes, passages & aphorisms.
What are some of yours? Leave them in the comment section below!
SE Belmont Street, Portland, OR (4.2009)
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Honoré de Balzac (1799 – 1850)
When you drink a cup of coffee, ideas come in marching like an army.
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William Newton Clarke (1841-1912)
Faith is daring your soul to go farther than it can see.
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Pema Chödrön (b. 1936)
Underneath our ordinary lives, underneath all the talking we do, all the moving we do, all the thoughts in our minds, there’s a fundamental groundlessness. It’s there bubbling along all the time. We experience it as restlessness and edginess. We experience it as fear. It motivates passion, aggression, ignorance, jealousy, and pride, but we never get down to the essence of it.
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929 – 1968)
“If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving.” – 1957
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Anonymous friend
A little bit more, every day.
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Cat’s Cradle :: Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007)
Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882)
Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air’s salubrity.
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Sometimes A Great Notion :: Ken Kesey (1935 – 2001)
Stop! Don’t sweat it. Simply move a few inches left or right to get a new viewpoint. Look…Reality is greater than the sum of its parts, also a damn sight holier. And the lives of such stuff as dreams are made of may be rounded with a sleep but they are not tied neatly with a red bow. Truth doesn’t run on time like a commuter train, though time may run on truth. And the Scenes Gone By and the Scenes to Come flow together in the sea-green deep while Now spreads in circles on the surface. So don’t sweat it. For focus simply move a few inches back or forward. And once more…look.”
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“St. Theresa’s Prayer” :: Saint Therese of Lisieux (1873 – 1897)
May today there be peace within.
May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be.
May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith.
May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you.
May you be content knowing you are a child of God.
Let this presence settle into your bones and allow your sould the freedom to sing, dance, praise, and love.
Is there for each and every one of us.
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“I Go My Way” :: Max Ehrmann (1872 – 1945)
All round is haste, confusion, noise.
For power and wealth men stretch the day
From dawn to dusk. But quietly
I go my way.
For glitter, show, to taunt the crowd,
Desire-tossed in wild dismay,
Men sell their souls. But quietly
I go my way.
The green of all the fields is mine,
The stars, the night, the wind at play,
A peaceful heart, while quietly
I go my way.
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The Outermost House :: Henry Beston (1888-1968)
Whatever attitude to human existence you fashion for yourself, know that it is valid only if it be the shadow of an attitude to Nature. A human life, so often likened to a spectacle upon a stage, is more justly a ritual. The ancient values of dignity, beauty, and poetry which sustain it are of Nature’s inspiration; they are born of the mystery and beauty of the world. Do no dishonour to the earth lest you dishonour the spirit of man. Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life. Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and dawn seen over ocean from the beach.”
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Fahrenheit 451 :: Ray Bradbury (b. 1920)
I hate a Roman named Status Quo. Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that, shake the great tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.
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Zorba The Greek :: Nikos Kanzantakis (1883 – 1957)
The day shone like a diamond of the first water. The higher we went, the more our spirits seemed to become purged and exalted. Once again I felt the influences on the soul of pure air, easy breathing and a vast horizon. Anyone would think the soul, too, was an animal with lungs and nostrils, and that it needed oxygen, was stifled in the dust or in the midst of too much stale breath.”
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Walden :: Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
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