When you listen you reach
into dark corners and
pull out your wonders.
When you listen your
ideas come in and out
like they were waiting in line.
Your ears don’t always listen.
It can be your brain, your
fingers, your toes.
You can listen anywhere.
Your mind might not want to go.
If you can listen you can find
answers to questions you didn’t know.
If you have listened, truly
listened, you don’t find your
self alone.
Nick Penna (who wrote this when he was nine years old)
If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.
Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.
If love were only a feeling,
there would be no basis for the promise
to love each other forever.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
The moment people talk of "implementing" instead of "doing,"
and of "finalizing" instead of "finishing,"
the organization is already running a fever.
Peter F. Drucker, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Kevin Kelly, quoting Clay Shirky in an article in The Technium
Love alone is not enough.
Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom.
Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving
but because we first stopped imagining.
James Hillman, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life
Of course I doubt [the existence of God], I would distrust anybody who didn't doubt. But I'm a believer. I have an understanding and belief in the divinity of things. It seems to me that people look at God in the wrong way. They think that God is there to serve them, but it's the other way around. God isn't some kind of cosmic bell-boy to be called upon to sort things out for us. It's important for us to realise that God has given us the potential to sort things out on our own.
Nick Cave, Observer interview 1998