Consult not your fears, but your hopes and dreams.
Think not about your frustrations,
but about your unfulfilled potential.
Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in,
but with what it is still possible for you to do.
Pope John XXIII
Quite an experience, to live in fear, isn't it?
That's what it is to be a slave.
Roy Batty, Blade Runner
(script by Hampton Fancher & David Peoples)
Fear is an emotion that makes us blind.
How many things are we afraid of?
We're afraid to turn off the lights when our hands are wet.
We're afraid to stick a knife into the toaster
to get the stuck English muffin without unplugging it first.
We're afraid of what the doctor may tell
us when the physical exam is over;
when the airplane suddenly takes a great unearthly lurch in midair.
We're afraid that the oil may run out,
that the good air will run out, the good water, the good life.
When the daughter promised to be in by eleven
and it's now quarter past twelve
and sleet is spatting against the window like dry sand,
we sit and pretend to watch Johnny Carson
and look occasionally at the mute telephone
and we feel the emotion that makes us blind,
the emotion that makes a stealthy ruin of the thinking process.
Stephen King, Night Shift
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear,
and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature
Since we can never know anything for sure,
it is simply not worth searching for certainty;
but it is well worth searching for truth;
and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes,
so that we have to correct them.
Sir Karl Popper, In Search of a Better World
You never change things
by fighting the existing reality.
To change something,
build a new model
that makes the existing model obsolete.
Buckminster Fuller
Creations are numberless, I vow to free them.
Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them
Realities are boundless, I vow to master them.
The Enlightened Way is unsurpassable, I vow to embody it.
Used by the Zen Center of New York
A modern, ecological version of these vows written by
Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen:
Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them.
Consuming desires are endless; I vow to stop them.
Bio-relations are intricate; I vow to honor them.
Nature's way is beautiful; I vow to become it.