thevolutionaries

Hi. I hope you and yours are well and will continue to be.  It doesn't hurt to remember that, while women are 55 % of the world, and some of them gave birth to the other 45 %, as well, there's a global war against middle-class to poor men; and, in Western societies, women side with the corporate structure.  For, if, for no other reason, the beauteous writing, prosaic or poetic, of many of our most revered and cherished works are at once literary gems and wisdom, of mundane to mystical, is it not this truth they all have in common, we‘re all one; and, therefore, all of humanity shares in common?  Where to start, Rumi, Milarepa, Thomas Merton's translations, especially of Chuang-Tzu, the Sermon on the Mount, et al, are so inspiring and lyrical, that we could surely believe they weren't penned by mortal hand; even though they were. Here's a few less commonly cited  :)

"If there was something in the air
If there was something in the wind
If there was something in the trees or bushes
That could be pronounced and once was overheard by animals,
Let this Sacred Knowledge be returned to us again.

Artharvaveda (VII, 66) as quoted in Entering the Circle"

"Discipline is the art of feeling awe.

Carlos Castenenda"

"Do not rush to answers, let the questions be questions until the answers are revealed.

Martha Graham"

"To walk in seasons is to question,
A flower is opening.

Basho"

clarity

Sword that cuts all ways,
Without, for, there's no cutting;
And a pointless point.

jmn

"Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty....
Go, go, go, said the bird, human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
And yet there is that other dimension altogether

in the very fact of consciousness itself:
To be conscious is not to be in time.
... Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where,

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
I will say to my soul, Be still, and let the dark come upon you,

Which shall be the darkness of God.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner

And outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving ...
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

T.S. Eliot's poetic opus, the cycle called "Four Quartets"

"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."
~ Howard Zinn

"How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right."
~ From Black Hawk (Makataimeshekiakiak) (1767-1838) Sauk war chief

"What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If you want to know your past life, look into your present condition; if
you want to know your future, look into your present action." ~ Padmisambha

"Yesterday is a dream, tomorrow but a vision. But today well lived makes
every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore to this day." ~ Sanskrit Proverb

"Don't ask the Lord to guide your footsteps unless you are willing to move
your feet." ~ Christian proverb

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"It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop."
~ Confucius

"People usually fail when they are on the verge of success. So give as much care to the end as to the beginning." ~ Lao Tzu

"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that things are difficult." ~ Seneca

"As a great fish swims between the banks of a river as it likes, so does the shining Self move between the states of dreaming and waking." ~ Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

"When spiders unite, they can tie down a lion."
~ Ethiopian Proverb, Courtesy of Strider, via Inez Matus

"To find yourself, think for yourself." ~ Socrates

The basis of all relations, including with self, and all studies, including activism and advocacy, are also environmental, spiritual… ~  jmn

"Believe nothing on the faith of traditions, even though they have been held in honor for many generations and in diverse places. Do not believe what you yourself have imagined persuading yourself a god inspires you. Believe nothing on the authority of your masters or priests. After examination believe that which you yourself have tested and found to be
reasonable and conform your conduct thereto." ~ The Buddha

"With sincerity and earnestness one can realize God through all religions. The Vaishnavas will realize God, and so will the Saktas, the Vedantists, and the Brahmos. The Mussalmans and Christians will realize Him to. All will certainly realize God if they are earnest and sincere." ~ Ramakrishna, `The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna'

"In my humble opinion, non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.", “Be the change you wish to see in the world”. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

"What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." ~ Crowfoot

"The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds." ~ A KNOT, by R.D. Laing

"Take care of everyone and abandon no one. Take care of everything and abandon nothing." ~ Lao Tzu

~ E F Schumacher says." Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful".

"What can be explained is not poetry." ~ WB YEATS

"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, effects all indirectly." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission, to be of service to them whenever they require it."
~ St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals.

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." ~ Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

"If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing. If you delight in killing, you cannot fulfill yourself." ~ Lao Tzu

"Peace is the only battle worth waging." ~ Albert Camus

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." ~ Aristotle

"Skill to do comes of doing." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Water always finds a way out." ~ Cameroon

"Leap, and the net will appear." ~ Julie Cameron

~ Lao-Tzu, "A journey of a 1000 miles begins with the first step."

"Few men have enough virtue to withstand the highest bidder." ~ George Washington

"You can't dismantle the man's house with the man's tools." ~ Audre Lourde

"If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything; If you don't ‘turn on’ politics, politics will turn on you." ~ Ralph Nader

"To walk in seasons is to question. A flower is opening. ~ Basho"

"Abhaya, fearlessness, is most important for an individual and a country."
~ Mahatma Gandhi

"Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen." ~ Leonardo da Vinci

"It's better to light one candle than to curse the darkness" ~ Emily Dickinson

"Nature is an instructive and impartial teacher, spreading no crude opinions, and flattering none; she will be neither radical nor conservative." ~ Henry David Thoreau

"What lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared to what lies within us." ~ Emerson

"All it takes for evil to rule a land is for good men to remain silent." ~ Daniel Webster

"The Native Mind tends to view wisdom and environmental ethics as
discernible in the very structure and organization of the natural
world rather than as the lofty product of human reason far removed
from nature. The Native Mind tends to view the universe as the
dynamic interplay of elusive and ever-changing natural forces, not as
a vast array of static physical objects. It tends to see the entire
natural world as somehow alive and animated by a single, unifying
life force, whatever its local Native name. It does not reduce the
universe to progressively smaller conceptual bits and pieces. It
tends to view time as circular (or as a coil-like fusion of circle
and line), as characterized by natural cycles that sustain all life,
and as facing humankind with recurrent moral crises-rather than as an
unwavering linear escalator of "human progress". It tends to accept
without undue anxiety the probability that nature will always possess
unfathomable mysteries. It does not presume that the cosmos is
completely decipherable to the rational human mind. It tends to view
human thought, feelings, and communication as inextricably
intertwined with events and processes in the universe rather than as
apart from them. Indeed, words themselves are considered spiritually
potent, generative, and somehow engaged in the
continuum of the cosmos, not neutral and disengaged from it. The
vocabulary of Native knowledge is inherently gentle and accommodating
toward nature rather than aggressive and manipulative. The Native
Mind tends to emphasize celebration of and participation in the
orderly designs of nature instead of rationally "dissecting" the
world. It tends to honor as its most esteemed elders those
individuals who have experienced a profound and
compassionate reconciliation of outer- and inner-directed knowledge,
rather than virtually anyone who has made material achievement or
simply survived to chronological old age. It tends to reveal a
profound sense of empathy and kinship with other forms of life,
rather than a sense of separateness from them or superiority over
them. Each species is seen as richly endowed with its own singular
array of gifts and powers, rather than as somehow
pathetically limited compared with human beings. Finally, it tends to
view the proper human relationship with nature as a continuous
dialogue (that is, a two-way,
horizontal communication between Homo sapiens and other elements of
the cosmos) rather than as a monologue (a one-way, vertical
imperative)."

David Suzuki