It’s a luxury to pursue what makes you happy; it’s a moral obligation to pursue what you find meaningful.
Life without law remains chaotic, effectively intolerable. Life that is pure law becomes sterile, equally unbearable. The domination of chaos or sterility equally breeds murderous resentment and hatred.
There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life.
Life is indistinguishable from effortful maintenance.
Territory matters, and there is little difference between territorial rights and social status. It is often a matter of life and death.
The only time no ever means no in the absence of violence is when it is uttered by one civilized person to another.
Treat yourself like you would someone you’re responsible for helping.
Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities.
When things break down, what has been ignored rushes in. When things are no longer specified, with precision, the walls crumble, and chaos makes its presence known. When we’ve been careless, and let things slide, what we have refused to attend to gathers itself up, adopts a serpentine form, and strikes – often at the worst possible moment. It is then that we see what focused intent, precision of aim and careful attention protects us from.
Michelangelo’s great perfect marble David” cries out to its observer: “You could be more than you are.
Every explorer is therefore, by necessity, a revolutionary, and every successful revolutionary is a peacemaker.
Chaos is where we are when we don’t know where we are, and what we are doing when we don’t know what we are doing. It is, in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor understand.
But we can aim too high. Or too low. Or too chaotically. So we fail and live in disappointment, even when we appear to others to be living well.
When you move, everything is up in the air, at least for a while. It’s stressful, but in the chaos there are new possibilities. People, including you, can’t hem you in with their old notions. You get shaken out of your ruts.
You preachers of equality, the tyrant-mania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue.
Your inaction, inertia and cynicism removes from the world that part of you that could learn to quell suffering and make peace.
You remember the past not so that it is “accurately recorded,” to say it again, but so that you are prepared for the future.
It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully, even if that bully is oneself.
It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.
It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for continued propagation.