Quotes on Ifs

Everybody comes from the same source. If you hate another human being, you're hating part of yourself.

Training is needed in order to love properly; and to be able to give happiness and joy, you must practice DEEP LOOKING directed toward the other person you love. Because if you do not understand this person, you cannot love properly. Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love. That is the message of the Buddha.

Love is the capacity to take care, to protect, to nourish. If you are not capable of generatng that kind of energy toward yourself - if you are not capable of taking care of yourself, of nourishing yourself, of protecting yourself - it is very difficult to take care of another person. In the Buddhist teaching, it's clear that to love oneself is the foundation of the love of other people. Love is a practice. Love is truly a practice.

A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body. For human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion. If they do not get it in one way, they must in another, or perish.

If you should look for this place after a handful of lifetimes:_x000D_ _x000D_ Perhaps of my planted forest a few_x000D_ _x000D_ May stand yet, dark-leaved Australians or the coast cypress, haggard_x000D_ _x000D_ With storm-drift; but fire and the axe are devils._x000D_ _x000D_ Look for foundations of sea-worn granite, my fingers had the art_x000D_ _x000D_ To make stone love stone, you will find some remnant.

[Emigrants] will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.

'And how, who am I? I will remember, if I can! I'm determined to do it!' But being determined didn't help much.

The science of design, or of line-drawing, if you like to use this term, is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture... Sometimes... it seems to me that... all the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.

Mother's love is bliss, is peace, it need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. If it is there, it is like a blessing; if it is not there it is as if all the beauty had gone out of life.

In sickness, with its attendant pain, patience is required. If the only perfect man who ever lived-even Jesus of Nazareth-was called upon to endure great suffering, how can we, who are less than perfect, expect to be free of such challenges?

If one is devoid of hope and thanksgiving, he cannot for long remain sinless, for he will, in despair, have slackened his resolve. Feelings of futility foster vulnerability. Self-pity is such a busy stagehand, rearranging the scenery to help sin make its entrance. No wonder the prophets say that without faith in the Lord, there is no hope.

If we want to make a change in our lives, we should first focus on our personal attitudes and behaviors.

Something happens inside of us when we are courteous and deferential toward others. It is all part of a refining process, which if persisted in, will change our very natures.

Don't say, "If I could, I would." Say, "If I can, I will."

Without authority there is no liberty. Freedom is doomed to destruction at every turn, unless there is a recognized right to freedom. And if there are rights, there is an authority to which we appeal for them.

. . . For friendship implies individuality; whereas comradeship really implies the temporary subordination, if not the temporary swamping of individuality. Friends are the better for being two; but comrades are the better for being two million.

If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.

All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious ad hoc magic.

There are also people who say it's God's curse on me that I should have it near my throat because that was the organ of blasphemy which I used for so many years. I've used many other organs to blaspheme as well if it comes to that.

If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false sentiment, I could never stay there five minutes.