Random Thoughts Part 9

It will take you less time to read this than it did to write it. Sounds like you're on the winning end of things:

You can either feel you are insignificant or feel you are part of something immense. These are two different interpretations you can make from a basic truth. For every basic truth, we can choose to see the dispiriting or the profound.

Great societies are maintained by great ideas, not great might. History is replete with powerful nations falling to lesser struggles.

A deeper understanding means letting go of what we thought we knew, which is frightening, because we must admit what we had lived before was fake.

We fear nothing as much as being humbled, yet feel relief upon reaching true humility.

It is a shame that the only resistance to a slavish obedience to a new world order is by those with a slavish obedience to an old world order.

Intelligence is merely a tolerance for ambiguity and a reticence for judgment. Both of these can be acquired through practice.

When you can no longer see the humanity of the other, it is you yourself that has become inhuman.

When we are afraid, we hide in our houses, our communities, our nations. Fear constricts, love expands. Love brings us out of our shells, out from behind our weapons and shields. Fear breads fear, love breads love. No person is a victim once he is made aware of this. It is only when one is unaware of this that one is a victim. When one is fearful, all of one’s actions are dictated by fear. The mind is shut down and the human acts as an animal. But once a person is made to realize that love brings freedom, he is his own agent, has no one to blame should he choose fear over love.

The only lesson we can teach our children, and perhaps anyone, is how to be happy. All messages we send them are suffused with neurosis or joy. It is this more than any advice we pass on that is absorbed and learned.

What separates man from the animals is the illusion of purpose.

Whenever reality must conform to simplistic models, the human is warped and twisted.

Mental diseases can be spread as easily as physical ones. Those in contact with others with a serious case of denial develop the same ailment. A loved one who is sick in the head is not easy to deal with.

Mental plagues are quite able to sweep through a nation, infecting minds with an idea or an attitude.

Freedom, to a capitalist, means nothing more than the freedom to make money. To them, the sound the Liberty Bell makes is “cha-ching”.

Nature or nurture? Cannot alcoholism be passed on through environment just as easily as through genes?

Love is the enjoyment one experiences by looking at the world through the eyes of another.

The idea of God is to see through eyes immensely larger than your own.

Old books are like seeds lying dormant in the ground. Though seemingly forgotten, they await the proper conditions, at which time roses and great trees can grow from them.

It will be the same tomorrow and the next day: you will always have as many reasons to hate as to love. Choose now which side you are on and commit to it.