Quotes on Has Beens

Like other Americans, I've reconciled myself to the idea that an animal's life has been sacrificed to bring me a meal of pork or chicken. However, industrial meat production - which subjects animals to a life of torture - has escalated the karmic costs beyond reconciliation.

The whole of the American Dream has been based on the chance to get ahead, for one's self or one's children. Would this country have ever reached the point it has if the individual had always been refused the rewards of his labors and dangers?

Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression.

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

I'm sure I would have been considered a more significant artist if I was a singer-songwriter. It's just not the way I roll. I love being a curator and a musicologist. People write me letters and thank me for turning them on to Fred McDowell and Sippie Wallace, and that's partly my job this time around.

But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from age to age.

Perhaps the greatest challenge has been trying to keep my time to myself and my private life private in order to do my job. Everything that is most mine belongs to everyone now.

Zen says that if you drop knowledge - and within knowledge everything is included; your name, your identity, everything, because this has been given to you by others - if you drop all that has been given by others, you will have a totally different quality to your being: innocence. This will be a crucifixion of the persona, the personality, and there will be a resurrection of your innocence. You will become a child again, reborn.

Women have been held back and limited throughout the centuries. Creation could not have been rendered, not even considered, let alone be brought into manifestation without woman. She is principal, a powerful energy. She is first.

An intelligence test sometimes shows a man how smart he would have been not to have taken it.

When this No-Mind has been well developed, the mind does not stop with one thing nor does it lack any one thing. It appears appropriately when facing a time of need.

My entire delight was in observing without being myself noticed,- if I could have been invisible, all the better. . . to be in the midst of it, and rejoice and wonder at it, and help it if I could, - happier if it needed no help of mine, - this was the essential love of Nature in me, this the root of all that I have usefully become, and the light of all that I have rightly learned.

Accept the risen Jesus into your life. Even if you have been far away, take a small step towards Him. He awaits you with open arms.

A sold-out house my first night back. Do you have any idea what kinda pressure that is? I could have been at home in my warm bed, playing Nintendo.

I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it.

All the events you have experienced in your lifetime up to this moment have been created by your thoughts and beliefs you have held in the past. They were created by the thoughts and words you used yesterday, last week, last month, last year, 10, 20, 30, 40, or more years ago, depending on how old you are

Like a twisted olive tree in its 500th year, giving then its finest fruit, is man. How can he give forth wisdom until he has been crushed and turned in the Hand of God.

The body of economic knowledge is an essential element in the structure of human civilization; it is the foundation upon which modern industrialism and all the moral, intellectual, technological, and therapeutical achievements of the last centuries have been built.

Today is a goblet day. The whole heavens have been mingled with exquisite skill to a delicious flavor, and the crystal cup put to every lip. Breathing is like ethereal drinking. It is a luxury simply to exist.

Since a rational man's ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit and achievement of values is a life-long process — and the higher the values, the harder the struggle — he needs a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved.

Southern culture has fostered a type of imagination that has been influenced by Christianity of a not too unorthodox kind and by a strong devotion to the Bible, which has kept our minds attached to the concrete and the living symbol.