What are the “ifs” and “buts” that limit my enjoyment of life?
There is no such thing as a peace of soul approach to religion. It makes of God a gigantic Bayer Aspirin; take God three times a day and you won’t feel any pain.
You can’t reinvent yourself for every movie.
The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail.
You cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths.
We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls ride over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things.
We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore.
The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock – cliffs of rock; plateaus of rock; terraces of rock; crags of rock – ten thousand strangely carved forms.
The elements that unite to make the Grand Canyon the most sublime spectacle in nature are multifarious and exceedingly diverse.
The Grand Canyon is a land of song. Mountains of music swell in the rivers, hills of music billow in the creeks, and meadows of music murmur in the rills that ripple over the rocks. Altogether it is a symphony of multitudinous melodies. All this is the music of waters. The adamant foundations of the earth have been wrought into a sublime harp, upon which the clouds of the heavens play with mighty tempests or with gentle showers.
We are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other – male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so very often do I. But none of us can do anything about it. James Baldwin, “Here Be Dragons.
True equality cannot be left to the whims of an electorate – is the predicate for democracy and the vote, not their product.
Honest, open communication is the only street that leads us into the real world... We then begin to grow as never before. And once we are on this road, happiness cannot be far away.
The only genuine love worthy of a name is unconditional.
The God I know would say to the person striving to earn or be worthy of his love: “You have it backwards. You are trying to change so that you can win my love. It just doesn’t and cannot work that way. I have given you my love so that you can change.
Emotions are only indicators. Habitual patterns of negative emotions are always a signal of some underlying misconception.
I must act against my phobias. Only in doing it will I learn that I CAN do it and thereby dispatch another delusion. Every day we should all do something that will extend us; we should win little victories over our fears that will widen the world and our lives.
True health resides principally in one’s vision, in one’s deepest attitudes; it is not merely the absence of symptoms. Likewise, true freedom has its roots in one’s basic vision of reality; it is not merely the absence of coercion from external forces.
Wherever you are in your development, whatever you are doing, with a strong affirmation of all your goodness and good deeds, with a gentle understanding of your weakness, God is forever loving you. You do not have to change, grow, or be good in order to be loved. Rather you are loved so that you can change, grow, and be good.
All change in the quality of a person’s life must grow out of a change in his vision of reality.
What we have to do is work with our vision. We must become more and more aware of its contents, discover its distortions, and replace faulty perceptions with those which are true. The truth alone can make us free.