Beauty

“Exuberance is beauty”

William Blake

Love & Kindness

"Life is short and we never have enough time for the hearts of those who travel the way with us. O, be swift to love! Make haste to be kind."

Henri-Frederic Amiel

Rita Rudner on Poodles

"I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult."

Rita Rudner

The mystery that is beauty

Beauty is not only a terrible thing, it is also a mysterious thing.
There God and the Devil strive for mastery,
and the battleground is the hearts of men.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Thoreau's view of lakes

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”

Walden, ‘The Ponds’

Creation is beautiful but corrupted

“Man…trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law –Tho’
Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrek’d against his creed/”

Tennyson, In Memoriam

No good goal is ever lost

Each Life Converges To Some Centre by Emily Dickinson.

Each life converges to some centre
Expressed or still;
Exists in every human nature
A goal,

Admitted scarcely to itself,
it may be,
Too fair
For credibility' s temerity
To dare.

Adored with caution, as a brittle heaven,
To reach
Were hopeless as the rainbow's raiment
To touch,

Yet persevered toward, surer for the distance;
How high
Unto the saints' slow diligence
The sky!

Ungained, it may be, by a life's low venture,
But then,
Eternity enables the endeavoring
Again.

Being for Myself

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?

Rabbi Hillel

True Simplicity isn't easy to come by

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Metaphysics and Woody Allen

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I
looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

Woody Allen

What really is realistic?

We have been taught to believe that negative equals
realistic and positive equals unrealistic

- Susan Jeffers

Suffering/Challenge

I don't know a soul that hasn't been battered
Don't have a friend who feels at ease
Don't know of a dream that's not been shattered
Or driven to its knees

- Paul Simon, American Tune

Love made clear

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of
separation.

Kahlil Gibran

Beauty

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's
deep enough.
What do you want - an adorable pancreas?

Jean Kerr

Locks

I have six locks on my door all in a row. When I go out, I only lock
every other one.
I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks,
they are always locking three.

Elayne Boosler

Wordsworth on the Human Heart

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Wordsworth