If you want to know the meaning of buddha-nature, observe the conditions of the time.
— Blue Cliff Record (Cleary 2002, 126)
Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.
— J. A. Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam (2000), p. 235.
When you come to a fork in the road— take it.
— Yogi Berra
Always think twice before taking advice.
— gnox
This inert sentence is my body, but my soul is alive, dancing in the sparks of your brain.
— Hofstadter (1985, 11)
Nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be.
— anon
Everything is always becoming something other than what it was becoming.
— Floyd Merrell (2003, 70)
The past will never look like the future did.
— gnox
The wise are they that speak not unless they obtain a hearing.
— Bahá’u’lláh, Hidden Words (Persian) #36
Perfect activity leaves no track behind it; perfect speech is like a jade-worker whose tool leaves no mark.
— Tao Te Ching 27 (Waley)
Time heals all wounds as silence heals all words.
— gnox
… a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
— Herbert Simon (1971)
More words count less.
— Tao Te Ching 5 (Feng/English)
Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.
— Simone Weil (as quoted by Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 233)
Pai Chang said, “All sayings and writings return to one’s self.”
— Blue Cliff Record (Cleary and Cleary 1977, 490)
What do you mean by that?
Only he who has a spirit of extreme humility can be said to have a resolute intellect.
— Gandhi (1926, 47)
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.— T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’
Stand before it and there is no beginning.
Follow it and there is no end.
Stay with the ancient Tao,
Move with the present.— Tao Te Ching 14 (Feng/English)
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.
— Maslow, The Psychology of Science
In the marvelous thirteenth-century legend called La Queste del Saint Graal, it is told that when the Knights of the Round Table set forth, each on his own steed, in quest of the Holy Grail, they departed separately from the castle of King Arthur. “And now each one,” we are told, “went the way upon which he had decided, and they set out into the forest at one point and another, there where they saw it to be thickest” (la ou il la voient plus espesse); so that each, entering of his own volition, leaving behind the known good company and table of Arthur’s towered court, would experience the unknown pathless forest in his own heroic way.
— Joseph Campbell (1968), 36
But by writing thithaways end to end and turning, turning and end to end hithaways writing and with lines of litters slittering up and louds of latters slettering down, the old semetomyplace and jupetbackagain from Ham Let Rise till Hum Lit Sleep, where in the waste is the wisdom?
— The Restored Finnegans Wake, 90-1
Wild goose chase: 2. fig. An erratic course taken or led by one person (or thing) and followed (or that may be followed) by another (or taken by a person in following his own inclinations or impulses); in later use (the origin being forgotten) apprehended as ‘a pursuit of something as unlikely to be caught as the wild goose’ (Johnson); a foolish, fruitless or hopeless quest.
— Oxford English Dictionary
The point of the probe is always in the heart of the explorer: What is my answer to the question of the nature of knowing? I surrender to the belief that my knowing is a small part of a wider integrated knowing that knits the entire biosphere or creation.
— Gregory Bateson (1979, 98)