Passing passages

'You cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing onto you.' - Heraclitus

'The human spirit is stronger than anything that can happen to it.' - C.C. Scott

All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king.

“ 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 am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own 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. ”

When I was five years old, my Mom always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down "happy". They told me I didn't understand the assignment and I told them they didn't understand life. ~anonymous

"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes deperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there. ~ Henry Miller

For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again. ~ Curious Case of Benjamin Button

'If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.' - Ivan Turgenev

Truth is, everybody's going to hurt you... you just gotta find the ones who are worth suffering for." ~ Bob Marley

“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they're afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you're letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.” ~ Jim Morrison

There are things known, and there are things unknown, And in between are the Doors ~ Jim Morrison

You are not bad people. You are blind to the present and we are blind to the future. In the immigration detention centre I used to smile when the detention officers explained to me, The reason you have come over here, you Africans, is that you just aren't capable of good government over there. I used to tell them that near my village there was a wide, deep river with dark caves under the banks where the fish were pale and blind. There was no light in their caves, so after a thousand generations the trick of seeing had been distilled out of their species. Do you see what I mean? I said to the detention officers. Without light, how can you preserve the vision of government? We could try as hard as we liked in my world. We could have a most diligent home secretary of lunchtime. We could have an excellent prime minister of the quietest part of the late afternoon. But when twilight comes- do you see? our world disappears. It cannot see beyond the day, because you have taken

He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. ~ 'Love in the time of cholera' , by Gabrial Garcia Marquez

One night he went to Don Sancho's Inn, an elegant colonial restaurant, and sat in the most remote corner, as was his custom when he ate his frugal meals alone. All at once, in the large mirror on the black wall, he caught a glimpse of Fermina Daza sitting at a table with her husband and two other couples, at an angle that allowed him to see her reflected in all her splendor. She was unguarded, she engaged in conversation with grace and laughter that exploded like fireworks, and her beauty was more radiant under the enormous teardrop chandeliers: once again, Alice had gone through the glass. Holding his breath, Florentino Ariza observed her at his pleasure: he saw her eat, he saw her hardly touch her wine, he saw her joke with the fourth in line of Don Sanchos; from his solitary table he shared a moment of her life, and for more than an hour he lingered, unseen, in the forbidden precincts of her intimacy. Then he drank four more cups of coffee to pass the time until he saw her leave

He liked to say that his love was a result of a clinical error. ~ 'Love in the time of cholera' , by Gabrial Garcia Marquez

He repeated until his dying day that there was no one with more common sense, no stonecutter more obstinate, no manager more lucid or dangerous, than a poet. ~ 'Love in the time of cholera' , by Gabrial Garcia Marquez

No, not rich. I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing. ~ 'Love in the time of cholera' , by Gabrial Garcia Marquez

He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. ~ 'Love in the time of cholera' , by Gabrial Garcia Marquez

I want to tell you something, which may not make any sense, but I should say it, just so that one day you'll remember it and, may be it will make you feel better. At a certain part in your life, probably when too much of it has gone by, you will open your eyes and see yourself for who you are. Especially for everything that made you so different from all the awful normals. And you will say to yourself, "But I am this person." And in that statement, that correction, there will be a kind of love. ~Miss Dodger (Phoebe in wonderland, 2008)

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: The longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness - that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what - at last - I have found. With equal passion I have s

"I unhappy?" she said, coming closer to him, and looking at him with an ecstatic smile of love. "I am like a hungry man who has been given food. He may be cold, and dressed in rags, and ashamed, but he is not unhappy. I unhappy? No, this is my unhappiness...." ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

"All is over," she said; "I have nothing but you. ... Remember that." ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

There was no solution, but that universal solution which life ... gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day – that is, forget oneself. To forget himself in sleep was impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could not go back now to the music sung by the decanter-women; so he must forget himself in the dream of daily life. ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

Alexey Alexandrovitch was not jealous. Jealousy according to his notions ... was an insult to one's wife, and one ought to have confidence in one's wife. Why one ought to have confidence – that is to say, complete conviction that his young wife would always love him – he did not ask himself. But he had no experience of lack of confidence, because he had confidence in her, and told himself that he ought to have it. Now, though his conviction that jealousy was a shameful feeling and that one ought to feel confidence, had not broken down, he felt that he was standing face to face with something illogical and irrational, and did not know what was to be done. Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife's loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself. ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love ... should be. And if you don't love me any more, it would be better and more honest to say so. ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

She was an honorable woman who had bestowed her love ... upon him, and he loved her, and therefore she was in his eyes a woman who had a right to the same, or even more, respect than a lawful wife. He would have had his hand chopped off before he would have allowed himself by a word, by a hint, to humiliate her, or even to fall short of the fullest respect a woman could look for. ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

Kitty expected Vronsky to ask her for a waltz, but ... he did not, and she glanced wonderingly at him. He flushed slightly, and hurriedly asked her to waltz, but he had only just put his arm round her waist and taken the first step when the music suddenly stopped. Kitty looked into his face, which was so close to her own, and long afterwards – for several years after – that look, full of love, to which he made no response, cut her to the heart with an agony of shame. ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

One would have thought that nothing could be simpler than ... for him, a man of good family, rather rich than poor, and thirty-two years old, to make the young Princess Shtcherbatskaya an offer of marriage; in all likelihood he would at once have been looked upon as a good match. But Levin was in love, and so it seemed to him that Kitty was so perfect in every respect that she was a creature far above everything earthly; and that he was a creature so low and so earthly that it could not even be conceived that other people and she herself could regard him as worthy of her. ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

"No, I'd better not speak of it," he thought, when ... she had gone in before him. "It is a secret for me alone, of vital importance for me, and not to be put into words. ~ Anna Karenina , by Leo Tolstoy

" We were saying how very important it is to bring about, in the human mind, the radical revolution. The crisis is a crisis in consciousness, the crisis that cannot anymore accept the old norms, the old patterns, the ancient traditions and considering what the world is now, with all the misery, conflict, destructive brutality, aggression and so on. Man is still as he was, is still brutal, violent, aggressive, acquisitive, competitive and... he has built a society along these lines." "What we are trying in all these discussions and talks here, is to see if we cannot radically bring about a transformation of the mind. *Not accept things as they are* - but to understand it, to go into it, examine it, give your heart and your mind with every thing that you have to find out. A way of living differently. But that depends on you and not somebody else. Because in this there is no teacher, no pupil. There's no leader, there is no guru, there's no master, no savior. You yo

www.givesmehope.com - This is sure to raise you up and restore your faith in humanity :)

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops" - Henry Adams

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncxloHrhit4

"A person doesn't die when he should but when he can." ~ One Hundred Years of Solitude , by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The world must be all fucked up when men travel first class and literature goes as freight. ~ 'One Hundred years of Solitude', by Gabrial Garcia Marquez