If anything is sacred, it is the entire universe. All of the organisms, including all the sentient ones, are made of the same atoms, which are passed from generation to generation and from trophic level to trophic level. We, and everything else alive today, are made of the atoms in the waters of the Precambrian ocean, of the atoms of the air our reptilean ancestors breathed, of the atoms in the soil on which Abraham walked, of the atoms of the trees under which Aristotle strolled, of the atoms of the tea Confucius drank, of the atoms of the wheat grown by the young Abe Lincoln. Consisting of the same matter, we are no less sacred, and no more sacred, than the universe itself.
The land and I are one.
Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.
The highest good is like water.
In dwelling, be close to the land.
Everything has a non-zero probability, but that is not a reason to accept its existence.
Species, and the human need for conceptual boxes:
It is wise to know the past, but to recognize it cannot be changed, and to not be fascinated by it. It is impossible to know the future, but better to be fascinated by it, and to determine it.
If the past is only that which has happened, there is no reason for the emotion called regret. The mistakes we have made and the things we have lost are only lessons from which to learn as we approach the future.
To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose.
The only impossibility is to undo the past*.
Thus there is little reason to fret over it.
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the flame in which we burn.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Those who have learned history are condemned to watch and suffer as others repeat its mistakes.
The future is an infinite set of parallel universes, and the present is the wand with which we select one and condemn the others to non-existence.
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
No man crosses the same river twice, for both the man has changed and the river has changed.
Inside every older person is a younger person screaming, "What the hell happened?".
Change, and change in change:
In a hundred years, no one will know or remember the hopes and fears, the delights and despairs, the decisions and destinations, that consume our everyday lives as we hurry through life - none of it will matter at all. The universe is far too fluid a medium for the ripples made by the pebbles of our lives to spread far in the ocean of time.
Why do things change? The better question is, why would they stay the same?
Among the attributes of the wise is the ability to distinguish between . . .
Buy yourself stout shoes, get away to the mountains, search the valleys, the shores of the seas, the deep recesses of the earth ... In this way, and no other, will you arrive at a knowledge of things.
One sure sign of weak intellect is the inability to recognize and deal with change.
Knowing others is wisdom;
He who knows he has enough is rich.
I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.
Empty yourself of everything.
Let the mind become still.
Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.
Knowledge is a river, truth is the valleys
through which it flows, and god is the ocean.
The levels of consciousness are
The most intellectually challenging music is silence, and the most challenging book is one of blank pages, because they force the mind to think for itself.
The great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
If you want enlightenment; know everything.
If you want power, know everyone.
For those who live in a small universe, small things can seem to be much larger than they are.
He who pursues fame at the risk of losing his self is not a scholar.
The eye sleeps until the mind wakes it with a question.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
It costs nothing to be polite.
Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.
I have gained this by philosophy: That I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.
Hope costs. Once you concede that problems can be solved, you have to get up off your ass. Despair, by contrast, is cheap, self-powering, eliminates unwanted guilt, and requires - permits! - no effort.
People are pretty much alike. It's only that our differences are more susceptible to definition than our similarities.
No person is as evil as his or her worst act, nor as good as his or her best.
A moment of hostility precludes an eternity of good will.
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
Those who fail to chart their own destinies are doomed to have others do it for them.
Most people live in prisons consisting of their personal and/or cultural pasts.
A life has no meaning except in the impact it has on other lives
You never get a second chance to make a good first impression.
Our mistake is to confuse our limitations with the bounds of possibility.
Luck is the residue of design.
To be turned from one's course by the opinions, blame and misrepresentations of others shows one to be unfit to hold an office.
There are few tasks that can not be done better by looking ahead.
The farther you climb up the flagpole, the more people can see your rear end.
You've got to have goals.
The secret isn't to work a lot, it's to work intelligently.
That which does not kill us makes us strong.
There is no "I' in team, but there are several in "possibility".
What makes life worth living is caring about something, no matter what it is. It's even better if it's shared.
For any task, a surprisingly large proportion of the work will be expended on a seemingly small final part of the task.
That's a more realistic statment of the "80%-20% rule":
or a correlary of
or the observation that
A short-term problem is commonly a symptom of a long-term problem. However, the solution to the long-term problem may be very different from the solution to the short-term problem.
Thought's Destruction of the Perception of Reality:
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It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes that make it useful.
Therefore benefit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.
In meditation, go deep in the heart.
In dealing with others, be gentle and kind.
In speech, be true.
In ruling, be just.
In daily life, be competent.
In action, be aware of the time and the season.
No fight; no blame.
Both mineralogy and biology use the word "species" to describe groups of entities that are fundamental units between which there are definite unbridgeable differences and within which there are inescapable similarities. In the mineral realm, the similarities within and differences between species are issues of chemical composition and atomic arrangement. In biology, the similarities and differences are in the arrangement of DNA, which leads to physiological similarities and differences.
In both mineralogy and biology, this notion of species encounters interesting results when applied to the real world. Individual mineral species have such varied forms that a skeptic would hardly believe them to be related and to share "inescapable similarities"; specular and rusty hematite are one example, and the euhedral, cherty, and sandy forms of quartz are another. In the biological realm, variation in plant species and species of colonial invertebrates can likewise be so great as to generate forms that appear fundamentally different, as when we compare dwarf and deformed krumholz trees at alpine treelines with their cousins from lower elevations. In both the mineralogical and biological realms, most of this variation is due to environmental control on development, leading to different morphologies or architectures from any one crystallographic or molecular plan.
We also find solid solutions between many minerals, so that any claim to "unbridgeable differences" is also lost; albite and anorthite are only the most common example. In biology, species are commonly found to interbreed successfully, leading one to conclude that either our identification of species has been flawed or that our concept of species is flawed.
If the concept is flawed, it is probably flawed by our assumption that natural entities exist in clearly definable groups rather than in continua. Epistomologists have argued that thought is impossible without language, and language is in turn impossible without words that have relatively fixed definitions. Thus our attempts to understand the natural world hinge on the assumption of definable units to which we can attach words. We will inevitably use those words, but we have to remember the fallibility of their definitions.
One result of the environmental control on the morphological expression of underlying genetic or crystallographic plans is a potentially broad continuum of form and ability. Perhaps here the extension of ideas about the natural world to the social world is most useful. We commonly apply the species concept to people, whether our categorizations are by nationality, by occupation, by age, by race, or by gender. If we analyze our categorization, we find any differences to be bridgeable, even in gender, and we find so much variation within any one of our categories as to make the prediction of the qualities of any one individual hopeless. Just as spruce trees range from tall straight-trunked individuals to short, crooked-stemmed, and asymmetric, all within one species, and as stromatoporoids ranged from lamellar to hemispherical to digitate with one species, the variation within Latvians or plumbers is too great for us to assume that any individual is anything like the average Latvian or the average plumber.
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to harvest.
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away.
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
Natural and human experience demonstrate that change is constant. In the mineral realm, mountain ranges and even continents have been successively generated and destroyed, and within them rocks have been generated and destroyed, and within those rocks minerals have been generated and destroyed. In the animal and plant worlds, the fossil record shows that life forms have changed with extinction and speciation, so that virtually no form of life has lasted long. History is the record of change at the societal scale, and it records no era without change. In a single human life, change is biologically inevitable. The illusion of the eternal exists only for those whose time span of observation is too short to see change in what they observe.
The only question is whether there are qualitative or quantitative changes in change. In the mineral realm, cycling of crust has probably slowed and rates of orogeny seemingly fluctuate, so that rates of change vary. However, a qualitative change in change may not have happened since the Hadean or Archean change from a meteoritic to tectonic system. Rates of extinction, and as a result speciation, have at least peaked occasionally, again yielding quantitative change in change; qualitative change in change may have occurred with the advent of sexual reproduction and may occur with human technological manipulation of genomes. Human history's revolutions imply peaks in societal change, and relatively recent attempts to direct societal change, as in the utopian efforts like the one in the Soviet Union, may be a qualitative change from earlier historical change that, where intentional, had only the intent of changing bases of power. In a human life, change varies from rapid, as in youth, adolescence, and sometimes in old age, to slow, as it commonly is in middle life. Change can also vary qualitatively from physical to intellectual to spiritual, although these changes closest to us are often the hardest to recognize.
experience and insight,
power and authority,
age and maturity,
motion and action,
haste and speed,
preparation and readiness,
knowledge and wisdom,
change and innovation,
possibility and probability,
prominence and importance,
measurement and evaluation,
precision and accuracy,
complexity and sophistication,
deference and respect,
negotiation and diplomacy,
concern and care,
and success and satisfaction.
Knowing the self is enlightenment.
Mastering others requires force;
Mastering the self requires strength.
Perseverance is a sign of will power.
He who stays where he is endures.
To die but not to perish is to be eternally present.
The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return.
They grow and flourish and then return to the source.
Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature, and the way of nature is unchanging.
Not knowing constancy leads to disaster.
Knowing constancy, the mind is open.
With an open mind, you will be at one with the Tao.
(1) Emotion: wanting and needing.
(2) The four dimensions: recognizing what is beyond one in space and in time.
(3) Reasons and relationships: understanding the other
(4) The universe and universality: remembering and perhaps understanding the cosmos.
(5) Levels as yet unrecognized.
20% of the effort will be required to do 80% of the job, but the last 20% of the job will require 80% of the effort.
"It ain't over 'til it's over".
Half the job is doing the job, and half the job is cleaning up afterwards.
Thought is the consideration of things that are not contemporaneously perceptible in one's environment. I can walk thorough the woods and think about Pericles, about something I said to my mother thirty years ago, about a house that my friend owns, about the Taj Mahal, about an action my boss will take next month, about the downfall of a character in science fiction novel set in the twenty-third century, or about the structure of salt crystals. None of those people or things is present in the woods through which I walk, and I am unaware of, and barely perceive, the woods as I think of these things.
This means that thought is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is the power that thought has given us - the power to plan for the next hunt or the next fiscal year, to learn from a past growing season or last week's board meeting, to conceptualize the structure of atoms or the positions of planets. The curse, which we rarely appreciate, is that thought largely precludes our perception of the world around us. In our walks through the woods, we truly look at the trees for only a few seconds, and as we eat we likewise savor only a small bit of our food. This often causes us to make mistakes - we drive through a red light or say something rude because our thoughts were elsewhere. Oddly, we say "I'm sorry, I wasn't thinking", when the problem was that we were thinking.
Setting aside thought and perceiving one's immediate reality is a key to relaxation. It may be relaxation itself. We may enjoy sex, and fast driving, or skiing, or intoxication, because they are activities in which thought becomes nearly impossible. Certainly setting aside thought makes a walk in the woods, or whatever diversion, a more refreshing and relaxing experience.