A Quote by Kurt Vonnegut
But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.
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If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes.
We see facts with our eyes; we see ideas with our minds; we see ideals with our souls. Whatever we see with our souls is real and permanent and cannot be destroyed.
We've lost touch with our souls. We've been nourishing our minds, our relational skills, our theological knowledge, our psychological well-being, our physiological health... but we've abandoned our souls.
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with the superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are true levellers. They give to all, who faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of our race.
We know only that we are living in these bodies and have a vague idea, because we have heard it, and because our faith tells us so, that we possess souls. As to what good qualities there may be in our souls, or who dwells within them, or how precious they are, those are things which seldom consider and so we trouble little about carefully preserving the soul's beauty.
Our resistance to this war should be our resistance to profit at the cost of human life. Because that is what these drums beating over Iraq are really about. This is about business.
They marched. Not for themselves. They marched to remember the ones who didn't make it back. They marched because seeing so much loss can teach you about life. they marched because we're all fighting a war whether we know it or not...a war for our minds and souls and what we believe in.
How important it is to ascertain the will of God, before we undertake anything, because we are then not only blessed in our own souls, but also the work of our hands will prosper.
What a large number of factors constitute a single human being! How very many layers we operate on, and how very many influences we receive from our minds, our bodies, our histories, our families, our cities, our souls and our lunches!
Unfortunately, as a society, we do not teach our children that they need to tend carefully the garden of their minds. Without structure, censorship, or discipline, our thoughts run rampant on automatic. Because we have not learned how to more carefully manage what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and/or political manipulation.
When our eyes see our hands doing the work of our hearts, the circle of Creation is completed inside us, the doors of our souls fly open and love steps forth to heal everything in sight.
Anger is precious because it is an immediate, undeniable clue to what our minds (so much more cautious in rejection and resistance than our bodies) will not tolerate.
Some people don't have hands, some don't have eyes - these people's struggle in life is real. We have been blessed with everything - a pair of eyes, ears, hands. What do we have to worry about? About having one more foot added to our height? Just because I am not six feet, won't I be respected?
As the great grandchildren of the industrial revolution, we have learned, at last, that the heedless pursuit of more is unsustainable and, ultimately, unfulfilling. Our planet, our security, our sense of equanimity and our very souls demand something better, something different.
God gave us minds to think with and hearts to thank with. Instead we use our hearts to think about the world as we would like it to have been, and we use our minds to come up with rationalizations for our ingratitude. We are a murmuring, discontented, unhappy, ungrateful people. And because we think we want salvation from our discontents.
So far as we know, Earth is the only planet which supports life, and it is the only planet on which we can survive. Our bodies and our minds are fashioned by it. Our hearts resonate with it. There will be little joy for the human spirit if we destroy the natural fabric of Earth with nothing left to do but go shopping. When we imagine the world a century from now, when we look our great grandchildren in the eye and see them smiling back at us because they know we cared for them, we smile too!
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