Quotations for a Divine Discontent

Posted on November 3, 2004 in Hope and Joy Reading Writing Exercises

I picked these up from a web site devoted to Gandhi and my own collection of extracts from my reading. I offer them to you, my beloved friends and readers:

“I do not believe in the doctrine of the greatest good of the greatest number. The only real, dignified, human doctrine is the greatest good of all.”

—Gandhi

“I can combine the greatest love with the greatest opposition to wrong.”

—Gandhi

“People try nonviolence for a week, and when it ‘doesn’t work,’ they go back to violence, which hasn’t worked for centuries.”

—Theodore Roszak

“Ten years ago I saw peace as a tangible goal. Today I see peace a little differently. Peacemakers, I have gradually recognized, function in the world much like kidneys function in our bodies, constantly, unendingly removing the wastes and poisons which are an inevitable part of our lives. As long as we live, the poisons of hate, injustice, and misunderstanding will be produced, and peacemakers will be needed to clean up the mess.”

—Barbara Stanford

“When your premise is ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ you can skip a lot of boring and distracting discussions and just get to work.”

—Alia Johnson

“I don’t know which is the greater task: to decentralize a top-heavy civilization or to prevent an ancient civilization from becoming centralized and top-heavy. In both cases the core of the problem is to discover what constitutes a good civilization, then proclaim it to the people and help them to erect it.”

—Gandhi

“There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grapenuts on principle.”

—G.K. Chesterton

The opposite of simplicity is not complexity, but fragmentation and alienation.”

—Mark Shepard

“All power corrupts, but we need electricity.”

—Diana Wynne Jones

Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur. Faith has nothing to do with profits: if anything, it has to do with prophets. Men who know and believe can forsee the future. They don’t want to put something over — they want to put something under us. They want to give solid support to our dreams. The world isn’t kept running because it’s a paying proposition. ( God doesn’t make a cent on the deal.) THe world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly; they underwrite it with their lives. In the struggle which they have to make themselves understood, they create music; taking discordant elements of life, they weave a pattern of harmony and significance. If it weren’t for this constant struggle on the part of a few creative types to expand the sense of reality in man, the world would literally die out. We are not kept alive by legislators and miltarists; that’s fairly obvious. We are kept alive by men of faith, men of vision. They are like vital germs in the endless process of becoming. Make room, then, for the life-giving ones!

–Henry Miller

I am able to love my God because He gives me freedom to deny Him.

Tagore

When a people start killing off their own symbols, they are in a bad way.

Lame Deer

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of things against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Matthew: 5:11-12

The fact is that we are painters in real life, and the important thing is to breathe as hard as ever we can breathe.

Van Gogh

Our too-young-and-too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists on seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black, [the male and the female]; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those it cannot understand, of excluding thos who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No: for I share these faults of character! And I do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to sufering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to prove into its most fundamental beliefs.

— Richard Wright

We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.

Pogo

….I have a prayer, did you know what prayer I use?”

“What?”

“I sit down and say, and I run all my friends and relatives and enemies one by one in this, without entertaining any angers or gratitudes or anything, and I say, like ‘Japhy Ryder, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha.’ Then I run on, say, to ‘David O. Selznick, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha’ though I don’t use names like David O. Selznick, just people I know because when I say the words ‘equally a coming Buddha’ I want to be thinking of their eyes, like you take Morley, his blue eyes behind those glasses, when you think ‘equally a coming Buddha’, you think of those eyes and you really do suddenly see the true secret serenity and the truth of his coming Buddhahood. Then you think of your enemy’s eyes.”

Jack Kerouac

One man practising kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.

Jack Keruoac

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Italo Calvino

It seems that two qualities are necessary if a great artist is to remain creative at the end of a long life; he must on one hand retain an abnormally keen awareness of life, he must never grow complacent, never be content with life, must always demand the impossible and when he cannot have it, must despair. The burden of the mystery must be with him day and night. He must be shaken by the naked truths that will not be comforted. This divine discontent, this disequillibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy. Many lesser poets have it only in their youth; some even of the greatest lose it in middle life. Wordsworth lost the courage to despair and with it his poetic power. But more often, the dynamic tensions are so powerful that they destroy the man before he reaches maturity.

Humphrey Trevelyan

All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help the world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it.

Joseph Campbell

If I have the money, I can take a plane to Tahiti and start life anew. Alas, I have not fled from myself, I carry with me the same flesh and blood, the same psyche, and I have now to re-create their fortunes under other conditions. The sense of an open world does not lie in these glittering possibilities of a leap into another mode of existence, but in something much more mundane and humble. In fact, that sense of the world’s being open may be assisted, not hindered, by some sustaining routine.

William Barrett

The odds are that every common notion, every accepted convention, is nonsense because it has suited itself to the majority.

Nicholas Chamfort

It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave driver of yourself.

Thoreau

The only way to speak the truth is to speak lovingly.

Thoreau

“Because things are unpleasant…that is no reason for being unjust toward God.”

Victor Hugo

Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love; it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

Graham Greene

Nothing seems more permanent than a long established government about to lose power, nothing more invincible than a grand army on the morning of its annihilation.

John Ralston Saul

A free man’s defense depends on his willingness to kill the Hero within himself in order to reject it in others.

John Ralson Saul

Never lose a holy curiosity.

Albert Einstein

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Martin Luther King

I am blessed, so blessed by this adversity. My eyes have been reopened to the splendors of the uncontrollable, chaotic, nature-roughed world. My sorrow is for those who know victory. To them belong short-lived joys. For all their hard work and success, the better part fell to me.

Then there is this: http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/003178.html#more. Thank you, Andrea.