#life

What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord. ↗

— John Cage

#zen #life

His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided. ↗

— Robert Louis Stevenson

#life

A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger. ↗

— Ben Okri

#mythology #stories #storytelling #life

One should preach not from one's rational mind but rather from the heart. Only that which is from the heart can touch another heart. One must never attack or oppose anyone. If he who preaches must tell people to keep away from a certain kind of evil, he must do so meekly and humbly, with fear of God. ↗

— Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

#eastern-orthodoxy #fear-of-god #humility #meekness #preaching

Common men talk bagfuls of religion but do not practise even a grain of it. The wise man speaks a little, even though his whole life is religion expressed in action. ↗

— Ramakrishna

#life

There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not “decorate” it; she infused it. ↗

— Michael Chabon

#mess #life

That didn't happen, of course. Things never happened like I imagined them. ↗

— John Green

#imagination

I recently read in the book My Stroke of Insight by brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor that the natural life span of an emotion—the average time it takes for it to move through the nervous system and body—is only a minute and a half. After that we need thoughts to keep the emotion rolling. So if we wonder why we lock into painful emotional states like anxiety, depression, or rage, we need look no further than our own endless stream of inner dialogue. ↗

— Tara Brach

#emotions #spirituality #life

Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do. ↗

— Eleanor Roosevelt

#life

Life is like a B-picture script. ↗

— Kirk Douglas

#life-metaphor #metaphor #life