Another Way of Knowing

Reflections

Reflections is a collection of quotes and short excerpts that I have compiled over the years from a variety of perspectives, including science, Native America, poetry, etc. Enjoy!

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I want to be the quiet in the garden.
I want to be the green on the leaf.
I want to be the reflection of the sky on still water.

~ Spiralsands ~

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Who will prefer the jingle of jade pendants
If she once has heard stone growing in a cliff?

~ Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching ~

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I realize that if I had to choose,
I would rather have birds than airplanes.

~ Charles Lindbergh ~
(first U.S. pilot to cross the Atlantic Ocean)

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What is life?
It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time.
It is the shadow which runs across the grass
and loses itself in the sunset.

~ Crowfoot, 1890 ~

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Knowledge does not come to us by details,
but in flashes of light from heaven.

~ Henry David Thoreau ~

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If the doors of perception were cleansed,
every thing would appear to man as it is,
infinite.
For man has closed himself up,
till he sees all things
thro’ narrow chinks in his cavern.

~ William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793 ~

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Take long walks in stormy weather
or through deep snows in the fields and woods,
if you would keep your spirits up.
Deal with brute nature.
Be cold and hungry and weary.

~ Henry David Thoreau ~

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The only calendar I need is just outside my window.
With eyes to see and ears to hear,
nature keeps me posted.

~ Alfred A. Montepart ~

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I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting,
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought;
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

~ T.S. Eliot ~

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Under the volcanoes,
beside the snow-capped mountains,
among the huge lakes,
the fragrant, the silent, the tangled Chilean forest…
My feet sink down
into
the dead leaves, a fragile twig crackles,
the giant rauli trees rise in all
their bristling height,
a bird from the cold jungle passes over,
flaps its wings,
and stops in the sunless branches.
And then, from its hideaway, it sings like an oboe…
This is a vertical world: a nation of birds,
a plenitude of leaves…
An enormous spider covered with red hair stares up at me,
motionless, as huge as a crab…
A golden carabus beetle blows its mephitic breath at me,
as its brilliant rainbow disappears like lightening…
A decaying tree trunk: what a treasure!…
Black and blue mushrooms have given it ears,
red parasite plants have covered it with rubies…
other lazy plants have let it borrow their beards,
and a snake springs out of the rotted body like a sudden breath…
A gorge; below, the crystal water slides over granite and jasper…
A fox cuts through the silence like a flash,
sending a shiver through the leaves…
I have come out of that landscape,
that mud, that silence,
to roam, to go singing through the world.

~ Pablo Neruda, Memoirs ~

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There is no God when there is nothing but God.

~ Stephen Mitchell ~
(translator of the Tao Te Ching)

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True, the white man brought great change.
But the varied fruits of his civilization,
though highly colored and inviting,
are sickening and deadening.
And if it be the part of civilization
to maim, rob, and thwart,
then what is progress?
I am going to venture that the man
who sat on the ground in his tipi
meditating on life and its meaning,
accepting the kinship of all creatures,
and acknowledging unity with
the universe of things,
was infusing into his being
the true essence of civilization…

~ Chief Luther Standing Bear ~
(in his 1933 autobiography)

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A human being is part of the whole
called by us universe,
a part limited in time and space.
We experience ourselves,
our thoughts and feelings,
as something separate from the rest.
A kind of optical delusion of consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us,
restricting us to our personal desires
and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison
by widening our circle of compassion
to embrace all living creatures
and the whole of nature in its beauty…
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking
if mankind is to survive.

~ Albert Einstein ~

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Progress is man’s ability to complicate simplicity.

~ Thor Heyerdahl ~

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Usually, terrible things that are done
with the excuse that progress requires them
are not really progress at all,
but just terrible things.

~ Russell Baker ~

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What we call ‘Progress’ is the exchange
of one nuisance for another nuisance.

~ Havelock Ellis ~

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Reality is merely an illusion,
albeit a very persistent one.

~ Albert Einstein ~

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What we observe is not nature itself,
but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

~ Werner Heisenberg, physicist ~

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If you can’t understand it, it is intuitively obvious.

~ Murphy’s Laws ~

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The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance,
it is the illusion of knowledge.

~ Stephen Hawking ~

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The moon is one,
but on agitated water it produces many reflections.
Similarly ultimate reality is one,
yet it appears to be many
in a mind agitated by thoughts.

~ Maharamayana ~

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If you could give up thoughts,
you will right here and now
attain the realisation of oneness with all.

~ Maharamayana ~

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In three words I can sum up everything
I’ve learned about life -
It goes on.

~ Robert Frost ~

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Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.

~ Unknown ~

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You can’t say that civilization don’t advance…
for in every war they kill you a new way.

~ Will Rogers ~

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Technological progress is like an axe
in the hands of a pathological criminal.

~ Albert Einstein ~

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The only reason for time is so that
everything doesn’t happen at once.

~ Albert Einstein ~

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We can’t solve problems by using
the same kind of thinking we used
when we created them.

~ Albert Einstein ~

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I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,
but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

~ Albert Einstein ~

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The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this,
that mankind set up in language a separate world
beside the other world,
a place it took to be so firmly set that,
standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges
and make itself master of it.
To the extent that man has for long ages believed
in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates
he has appropriated to himself that pride by which
he raised himself above the animal:
he really thought that in language
he possessed knowledge of the world.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human ~

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Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature,
but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature,
placed alongside thereof for its conquest

~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy ~

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They say that dreams are only real as long as they last.
Couldn’t you say the same thing about life?”

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There are a thousand hacking
at the branches of evil
to one who is striking at the root.

~ Henry David Thoreau ~