A Quote by Alain de Botton
Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.
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However small we are, we should always fight for what we believe to be right. And I don’t mean fight with the power of our fists or the power of our swords…I mean the power of our brains and our thoughts and our dreams. And as small and quiet and unimportant as our fighting may look, perhaps we might all work together…and break out of the prisons of our own making. Perhaps we might be able to keep this fierce and beautiful world of ours as free for all of us as it seemed to be on that blue afternoon of my childhood.
Mind can only desire, and each desire is going to be frustrated. Instead of bringing more meditation, it will bring you more frustration. Instead of bringing you more love, it will bring to you more anger. Instead of silence and peace, it will bring more traffic of thoughts.
In most of our situations in life, if we take a good honest look at our lives, we are holding to small, limiting thoughts, cynical thoughts.
Bringing the individual into it music only distracts from the universal and makes it trivial. And then it's easy to wash your hands of it because you might not be from their background, or you might disagree with their personal perspective. So you discount it and go back into your corner instead of coming out and engaging with everything.
God who created us has granted us the faculty of speech that we might disclose the counsels of our hearts to one another and that, since we possess our human nature in common, each of us might share his thoughts with his neighbor, bringing them forth from the secret recesses of the heart as from a treasury.
My reason for fixing them in office for a term of years, rather than for life, was that they might have an idea that they were at a certain period to return into the mass of the people and become the governed instead of the governors which might still keep alive that regard to the public good that otherwise they might perhaps be induced by their independence to forget.
The possession of a quantity of plants, however good the plants may be themselves and however ample their number, does not make a garden; it only makes a collection. Having got the plants, the great thing is to use them with careful selection and definite intention.
We should amuse our evening hours of life in cultivating the tender plants, and bringing them to perfection, before they are transplanted to a happier clime.
I've got deeper journeys to take. Metaphysical journeys. Journeys to see Christ. Shaman journeys. It's what I've been elected by God to do.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded on our thoughts; it is made up of our thoughts. A man's life is the direct result of his thoughts... We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.
Instead of constantly enhancing the norm - forever upping the ante of the 'normal' with new technologies - we should work on enhancing the concept of normal by broadening appreciation of anatomical variation.
Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that's life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever.
For comedians, we're all kind of tweeting our thoughts instead of spending time developing them. You can gauge how good a joke might be by how many times it gets retweeted, but it takes discipline to go back through the tweets and then develop jokes from them.
My hope is that a religious consciousness will begin to rise, one based on enhancing humanity, grasping life in all of its complex wonder, having the courage to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that each of us can be and that it will express itself in our national life in more earth centered, justice enhancing and humane ways.
We need to transcend our thoughts and desires to truly understand philosophy and the universe as a whole. However, in our everyday life, we deal with the micro universe and with our own affairs. Therefore we need to use our brain. To practice Tao is not to rid yourself of all thoughts. There are actually more occasions when you would use your true intention instead of non-desire.
When we have completed all the journeys and adventures through our variety of lives we are supposed to return to the creator with our accumulation of knowledge. It is then absorbed. In this way we are considered cells in the body of God.
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