Jimmy Winokur
The Mind, Emotions, Human Nature
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You Cannot Win Life
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On Creativity
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Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein
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Of mixed mind... |
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Ambivalence is Everywhere!
Whatever we feel strongly about,
"The Principle of Ambivalence,"
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It is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and something in our sweetheart that we dislike. William Butler Yeats
Love involves a peculiar Diane Arbus
If I am not for myself,
who will be for me?
Rabbi
Hillel
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The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Doubt Voltaire . |
The dangerous man Francis Crick |
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You yourself are participating
Joseph Campbell.
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Nothing endures but change.
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One
may not reach the dawn
save by the path of the night.
Kahlil Gibran
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Even in our sleep,
Aeschylus, quoted by Robert F. Kennedy in Spring, 1968, on the occasion of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination , and referring back to his brother', J FK's assassination 5 years earlier. Within a few months, Bobby himself was assassinated upon winning the California Democratic Presidential primary. |
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You wish to see?
Manfred Eicher
How do I know what I think Francis Crick
Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise.
John Cage
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Intention:
On the desk before which I sit lies a sheet of paper. If I have in mind to make some notes on the paper for my
manuscript, I see the paper in terms of its whiteness; has it already been scribbled upon? If my intention is to
fold it into a toy plane for my grandson, I see the paper in its sturdiness. Or if my intention is to draw a picture
on it, I see the rough, course grained texture of the paper inviting my pencil and promising to make my lines
bore interesting.
…. Such is the amazingly intimate interrelation of my subjective experience with what goes on in the objective world:
I cannot perceive something until I can conceive of it. Professor Donald Snygg has reminded us of that memorable
event when the people in a primitive society were unable to see Captain Cook’s ship when it sailed into their harbor
because they had no word, no symbol, for such a ship.
What they did perceive I do not know – possibly a cloud or an animal;
but at least it was something they did have a symbol for….
The word “conceive” is used in our society to mean to become pregnant, and the analogy is not inappropriate.
For the act of perceiving also requires the capacity to bring something in one’s self; if one cannot, or for some
reason is not ready, to bring to birth in himself some position, some stance toward what he is seeing, he
cannot perceive it.Rollo May, Love and Will (1969)
The pleasure a man gets from a landscape would [not] last long
if he were convinced a priori that the forms and colors he sees
are just forms and colors, that all structures in which they play a role
are purely subjective and have no relation whatsoever
to any meaningful order or totality, that they simply and necessarily express nothing....
No walk through the landscape is necessary any longer;
and thus the very concept of landscape as experienced by a pedestrian
becomes meaningless and arbitrary. Landscape deteriorates altogether into landscaping.Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (1947) via Doug Linder
We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital principle within us protests against the idea. Probably most persons have lain certain mornings for an hour at a time unable to brace themselves to the resolve. We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day [on Harvard's psychology faculty] will suffer; we say, “I must get up, this is ignominious,” and so on. But still the warm couch feels too delicious, and the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of the decisive act. Now how do we ever get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs, we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some reverie connected with the day’s life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us, “Hollo! I must lie here no longer” – an idea which at that lucky instant awakes no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the cold during the period of struggle which paralyzed our activity….
This case seems to me to contain in miniature form the data for an entire psychology of volition. William James, Principles of Psychology (1890)
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together;
and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will,
we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.William James
Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past was different than it was.
Terrie Pierce
Your own lights..
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There is something in every one of you that waits and listens
Howard Thurman
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.... It’s like the story of the old rabbi who lay upon his deathbed as the final hour drew near. His name was Zushya and he had lived a long enough life. He was a holy man who had studied scholarly texts and taught others for many years.... More than that, he was revered and loved by his students for his honesty and for his wit. Now that his time had come, his faithful students gathered around to share in his final moments. With characteristic honesty, the old teacher ... explained that with the hour of death approaching he feared having to face God. “I am afraid, “he said, “of God’s final justice. I fear that I will be punished in the world to come.” The students were shocked; how could
such a thing be possible? Their teacher was an exceptional religious
leader who had taught them generously and guided them wisely. Now, the
students began to reassure the teacher: “Rabbi
you are a pure and righteous man. You have shown the leadership of
Abraham, the courage of Jacob, the vision of Moses, and the moral
fortitude of the greatest prophets. What do you have to fear in facing
God?”
Teaching from Reb Zushya at his death
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If you expect someone else to guide you, you'll be lost.
James Earl Jones
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein
If they give you lined paper, write the other way...
Juan Ramon Jimenez
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.George Bernard Shaw
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.John Archibald Wheeler , American J. of Physics 1978
Knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men;
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
William Cowper, 1785
(This is one of several quotations on these pages drawn from the collections of my dear friend Michael MaggioWisdom is not communicable.
The real wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish.
Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom.
One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.Hermann Hesse
"You don't choose a life, dad. You live one.”
Emilio Estevez, in The Way (2011)
The collective
unconsciousness seems to be not a person,
but something like an unceasing stream
or perhaps ocean of images and figures,
which drift into consciousness in our
dreams or in abnormal states of mind.
I understood that there is something in me
which can say things that I do not know and do not intend,
things which may even
be directed against me.
Carl Jung
You can never step in the same river twice.
Heraclitus
Life is what happens when you are making other plans.
John Lennon
(shortly before he was murdered)
The more intelligence one has the more people one finds original.
Commonplace people see no difference between men.
Blaise Pascal, 1669
A widely-read man never quotes accurately,
for the rather obvious reason that he has read too widely.
Hesketh Pearson, Common Misquotations (1934)
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As far as the laws of mathematics
refer to reality, they are not certain. And as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. Albert Einstein |
The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Happiness if a form of courageHolbrook Jackson
As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more
by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.Robert Bly
The soul needs actually more rest than the body
and it could be that our restless soul is at the basis of all of our physical ills.quoted by Eleanor Futscher
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world,
that is
something you are free to do and it accords with your nature,
but perhaps this
very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.
Franz Kafka
It's never too late to become what you might have been.
Georg Eliott
(thanks to Lisa Gilford)
Accept the fact that you are accepted, despite the
fact that you are unacceptable.
Paul Tillich, defining “Grace”, in his Shaking the Foundations
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The Western Idea of practice is to acquire a skill. It is very much related to your work ethic,
which enjoins us to endure struggle or boredom now in return for future rewards. The Eastern idea
of practice, on the other hand, is to create the person, or rather to actualize or reveal the complete
person who is already there…. Not only is practice necessary to art, it is art.Stephen Nachmanovitch, in Free Play (1990)
A really intelligent man feels what other men only know.
Baron de Montesquieu, 1736A little knowledge is a dangerous thing…. But, then, so is a lot. Albert. Einstein
Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.
Bertrand Russell
I do not know what I may appear to the
world,
but to myself I seem to have been only like
a boy playing on the seashore,
and diverting myself in now and then finding a
smoother pebble
or a prettier shell than ordinary,
whilst the great ocean of truth lay all
undiscovered before me.
Isaac Newton
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions,
their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.Oscar Wilde
A bore is a person who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.
Gian Gravina
It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen. Oliver Wendell Holmes
A good listener is a good talker with a sore throat.Katherine Whitehorn
Our deepest fear is
not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond
measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask
ourselves, who are we to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be? You playing small doesn't serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so other people won't feel insecure
around you.....
And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other
people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our
presence automatically liberates others!
Marianne Williamson, A
Return to Love
famously attributed to
Nelson Mandela's 1994 Inauguration Speech,
though Mandela apparently
never used the
quote in his speeches
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed,
and in such desperate enterprises?
If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer:
Let him step to the music which he hears,
however measured or far away.Henry David Thoreau
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These next 2 passages on the Balanced Life were also encountered on Doug Linder's site
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This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers....How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?....We need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without being once merely comfortable. G. K. Chesterton
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Healthy personality involves a balance between receptivity and manipulation, between wonder and action....The unity of the authentic life is plural; its wisdom lies in understanding the necessity for the changing moments and seasons of life....Wisdom comes, usually with age, when a man can look back over his years and realize that there is an economy to the seasons of life. He see that the times of strife, suffering, and waiting which seemed so difficult to endure were as necessary to the formation of personality as the times of love, joy, and ecstasy. To love and accept the self as it is, is to accept all the moments that formed it. |
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It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but
cruel; Lionel Trilling |
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Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.
Lately it doesn't seem to be working....
Albert von Szent-Gyorgy
Barack might be thinking this right about now, 5/09 :
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The Ku tribe have a tradition
that a convicted murderer will be bound The Drowning Man Ritual, a mythical custom, per "Sylvia Broome" (played by Nicole Kidman) in The Interpreter (2005), written by Charles Randolph, Scott Frank & Steven Zaillian
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"What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world." Albert Einstein, remarking to his assistant, Ernst Straus
Icarus (see my:" Parts of a Spiritual Journey")
.... Meanwhile Daedalus, hating Crete, and his long exile, and filled with a desire to stand on his native soil, was imprisoned by the waves. ‘He may thwart our escape by land or sea’ he said ‘but the sky is surely open to us: we will go that way: Minos rules everything but he does not rule the heavens’. So saying he applied his thought to new invention and altered the natural order of things. He laid down lines of feathers, beginning with the smallest, following the shorter with longer ones, so that you might think they had grown like that, on a slant. In that way, long ago, the rustic pan-pipes were graduated, with lengthening reeds. Then he fastened them together with thread at the middle, and bees’-wax at the base, and, when he had arranged them, he flexed each one into a gentle curve, so that they imitated real bird’s wings. His son, Icarus, stood next to him, and, not realising that he was handling things that would endanger him, caught laughingly at the down that blew in the passing breeze, and softened the yellow bees’-wax with his thumb, and, in his play, hindered his father’s marvellous work.
When he had put the last touches to what he had begun, the artificer balanced his own body between the two wings and hovered in the moving air. He instructed the boy as well, saying ‘Let me warn you, Icarus, to take the middle way, in case the moisture weighs down your wings, if you fly too low, or if you go too high, the sun scorches them. Travel between the extremes. And I order you not to aim towards Bootes, the Herdsman, or Helice, the Great Bear, or towards the drawn sword of Orion: take the course I show you!’ At the same time as he laid down the rules of flight, he fitted the newly created wings on the boy’s shoulders. While he worked and issued his warnings the ageing man’s cheeks were wet with tears: the father’s hands trembled.
He gave a never to be repeated kiss to his son, and lifting upwards on his wings, flew ahead, anxious for his companion, like a bird, leading her fledglings out of a nest above, into the empty air. He urged the boy to follow, and showed him the dangerous art of flying, moving his own wings, and then looking back at his son. Some angler catching fish with a quivering rod, or a shepherd leaning on his crook, or a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough, saw them, perhaps, and stood there amazed, believing them to be gods able to travel the sky.
And now Samos, sacred to Juno, lay ahead to the left (Delos and Paros were behind them), Lebinthos, and Calymne, rich in honey, to the right, when the boy began to delight in his daring flight, and abandoning his guide, drawn by desire for the heavens, soared higher. His nearness to the devouring sun softened the fragrant wax that held the wings: and the wax melted: he flailed with bare arms, but losing his oar-like wings, could not ride the air. Even as his mouth was crying his father’s name, it vanished into the dark blue sea, the Icarian Sea, called after him. The unhappy father, now no longer a father, shouted ‘Icarus, Icarus where are you? Which way should I be looking, to see you?’ ‘Icarus’ he called again. Then he caught sight of the feathers on the waves, and cursed his inventions. He laid the body to rest, in a tomb, and the island was named Icaria after his buried child.
The Myth of Daedalus and Icarus
Bk VIII:183-235
Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.
Marshall McLuhan
The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.
Alfred Adler
There is also in us the maverick, the darling stubborn one who won't listen, who insists, who chooses preference or the spirited guess over yardsticks or even history. I suspect this maverick is somewhat what the soul is, or at least that the soul lives close by.
Mary Oliver, Long Life and Other Essays.
I never have found the perfect quote.
At best I have been able to find a string of quotations
which merely circle the ineffable idea I seek to express.
Caldwell O'Keefe
Ways to Rethink Fear
Frances Moore Lappe and Jeffrey Perkins
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Fear means
danger. Something's wrong. |
Fear is
pure energy. It's a signal that could mean stop or could mean go. |
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If I stop
what I'm doing, I'll be lost. |
Sometimes
we have to stop in order to find our path. |
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I have to
figure it all out before I can do anything |
We don't
have to believe we can do it. Showing up, even with fear, has power. |
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If I act on
what I believe, conflict will break out. |
Conflict
means engagement. Something is in motion. It is an opening, not a closing. |
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Our greatest
fears are our worst enemies; |
Our worst
fears are our greatest teachers. |
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If I'm really myself, I'll be excluded and alone forever. |
To find real
connection, we must risk disconnection. Our courage draws others toward us. |
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I'm just a drop in the bucket. My effort might make me feel better, but it won't help. |
Every time
we act, even with fear, we help others to do the same. Courage is contagious. |
The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected
without trials.
Chinese Proverb
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves
as if they were locked rooms
or books written in a very foreign language.
Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now,
because
you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday
far in the future,
you will gradually, without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke,
From Letters to a Young
Poet
The sacred demands the violation of what is normally the object of terrified respect. Georges BattailleLearning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies.
Leon Trotsky
When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be
touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless,
that it doesn't have any
resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover
how
much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space. Your world
seems less solid, more
roomy and spacious. The burden lightens. In the beginning
it might feel like sadness or a shaky feeling,
accompanied by a lot of fear, but
your willingness to feel the fear, to make fear your companion, is
growing.
You're willing to get to know yourself at this deep level. After a while this
same feeling begins
to turn into a longing to raze all the walls, a longing to
be fully human and to live in your world without
always having to shut down and
close off when certain things come along. It begins to turn into a longing
to be
there for your friends when they're in trouble, to be of real help to this poor,
aching planet. Curiously
enough, along with this longing and this sadness and
this tenderness, there's an immense sense of well-being,
unconditional
well-being, which doesn't have anything to do with pleasant or unpleasant, good
or bad, hope
or fear, disgrace or fame. It's something that simply comes to you
when you feel that you can keep your
heart open.
Pema Chodrun, Start Where You Are,1994
Ideas that enter the mind under fire remain there securely and for ever.
Leon Trotsky
Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe
that something inside them was superior to circumstance
Nothing worth doing is
completed in our lifetime;
therefore we must be saved by hope.
Nothing true or
beautiful makes complete sense
in any immediate context of history;
therefore we
must be saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished
alone;
therefore, we are saved by love.
Reinhold Niebuhr
"What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for liberty of the world,
who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage..."Bruce Barton
Is teann gach madra gearr i ndoras a thi fein :
Every terrier (little dog) is brave in its own doorway.Irish Proverb (thanks to Mari)
