Aate hain ghaib yeh mazameen kyal mein

Ghalib sareer khama nawaa-e-sarosh hai

(Inspiration descends from the unseen dimension/Ghalib merely scribbles what the angels dictate)

  • Mirza Ghalib

I felt in need of a great pilgrimage so I sat still for three days.

  • Hanif Shirazi (Persian Sufi poet)

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.

  • Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The greatest result of your work is the way it changes you, not anything external

  • From Gajula Stayanarayana’s Peddha Bala Siksha

It’s not what you read, but what you remember that’s important

  • From Gajula Stayanarayana’s Peddha Bala Siksha

If you cannot manage your time, you can manage nothing.

  • Carlyle

To beauty such as this
No woman could give birth;
The quivering lightning flash
Is not a child of earth.

  • Kalidasa’s Shakuntala, translated by Arthur Ryder

The labourer sells his body. The technician sells his mind. The businessman sells his soul.

  • Unknown

Innaalile sangeedhamum sandhoshamum ondranadhe

(Music and joy this day have become one)

  • Kavignar Vaali (from the song ‘Neelakuyile unnodu naan pan paaduven’)

If you know to study, you know enough.

  • Henry Adams

Dhevathula padhuvulanu abhilashinche varu saraswathi dhevini koluchukuntaru.

(Those who seek the feet of the Gods worship Goddess Saraswati)

  • Rig Veda

It is a charge against India that her people are so uncivilised, ignorant and stolid, that it is not possible to induce them to adopt any changes. It is a charge really against our merit. What we have tested and found true on the anvil of experience, we dare not change.

  • Mahatma Gandhi

That’s what any of us are, amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.

  • Charlie Chaplin, Limelight.

The mind is a skilful builder but an amazingly poor judge of the foundations it builds on, and logical theories are only too often built on beliefs and prejudices that may be taken for granted and therefore almost unconscious.

  • Arthur Osborne, The Rhythm of History

…The mystics who find a foretaste of freedom in the love of every cloud in the sky and flower at their feet.

  • Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Shiva

We sit down to paint a beautiful picture, or stand up to dance, and having nothing in us that we feel must be said and said clearly at all costs, we are surprised that the result is insipid and lacks conviction; the subject may be lovely, the dancer may be ravishing, but the picture and the dance are not rasavant.

  • Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Shiva

The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

  • Eden Phillpotts

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

  • Isaac Newton

And whilst we thus should make our sorrows one,
This happy harmony would make them none

  • W Alexander, Earl of Sterline

Oh world, where all things change and nought abides, Oh life, the long mutation…is it so? Is it with life as with the body’s change? Where, e’en tho’ better follow, good must pass.

  • Robert Browning

You can never jump into the same river twice.

  • Heraclitus

Whatever you are totally ignorant of, assert to be the explanation for everything else.

  • H S Hodgson

Wish for sunshine, but build dykes.

  • Mao Zedong

I suspect that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

  • J B S Haldane

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

  • Hamlet, Shakespeare

Would any man of sound understanding, who had lived long enough, and has meditated on the worth of human existence, care to go again through life’s poor play, I do not say on the same conditions, but on any conditions whatever?

  • Immanuel Kant

The man who sleeps on the floor will not fall out of bed.

  • Turkish proverb (found in ‘This is It’, Alan Watts)                                                                                                                  

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

  • Jonathan Swift

Our job is to make music with what remains.

  • Izhtak Perlman

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on – have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear – what remains? Nature remains.              

All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it.
Did you think it was in the white or grey stone? Or the lines of the arches and cornices?
All music is what awakes in you when you are reminded of it by the instruments.
It is not the violins and the cornets…nor the score of the baritone singer
It is nearer and further than they.                                    

  • Walt Whitman

If you could blow the brain up to the size of a mill and walk about inside, you would not find consciousness.

  • Gottfried Leibniz (17th century; he was known as ‘the last man who knew everything’, though others also lay claim to this title.)

Toss-pot and shuttle-wit run in, but my Lord Good-Counsel sits o’ one side, waiting.

  • R L Stevenson (in Black Arrow)

May the open hand be filled the fullest.

  • Gaelic saying (found in Waverly, by Walter Scott)      

Enough is as good as a feast.

  • English proverb (found in Waverly, by Walter Scott)

Save the dharma and the dharma saves you.

  • Old saying, from a comment on YouTube (on a video about murthy worship in Hinduism). (Possibly more accurately: ‘Protect dharma, and dharma will protect you.’)

Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

  • (From Spontaneous Evolution by Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman)

There is nothing more practical than a good theory.

  • Hermann Von Helmholtz  (German physicist and physician)

The populace is an imbecile flock of sheep, now steadily patient, now in ferocious revolt. Say to it: “Amuse yourself,” and it amuses itself. Say to it: “Go and fight with your neighbour,” and it goes and fights. Say to it: “Vote for the emperor,” and it votes for the emperor, and then say to it” “Vote for the republic,” and it votes for the republic. Those who direct it are also stupid; but instead of obeying men they obey principles, which can only be stupid, sterile and false, for the very reason that they are principles, that is to say, ideas which are considered to be certain and unchangeable, in this world where one is certain of nothing, since light is an illusion and noise is an illusion.

  • Guy de Maupassant (in the short story The Horla, or Modern Ghosts)

God made man in His own image, but man has certainly paid Him back again.

  • Voltaire

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities

  • Voltaire

A lie gets half-way around the world before the truth has time to put its pants on.

  • Winston Churchill

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.

  • Karl Marx

Preparation means to be able to receive and impart…the degree of reception determines the quality of knowledge given. The exchange is precise, and is paid for by the amount of conscious attention in a complex situation. Where attention is, there is power.

  • Kabbalist Z’ev Ben Shimon Halevi

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

  • William James (one of the founders of the philosophical school of pragmatism)

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

  • Steven Weinberg

There is nothing over which a free man ponders less than death; his wisdom is, to meditate not on death but on life.

  • Spinoza (found in ‘What is Life?’ by Erwin Schrodinger)

Yes, please move a step to the right, you’re blocking the light.

  • Diogenes (the father of ‘cynicism’) when asked by Alexander if there was anything he could do for him.

Terror and pity may be raised by decoration – the mere spectacle; but they may also arise from the circumstances of the action itself, which is far preferable and shows a superior poet. For the fable should be so constructed that without the assistance of the sight its incidents may excite horror and commiseration in those who hear them only. But to produce this effect by means of the decoration discovers want of art in the poet, who must also be supplied with expensive apparatus.

  • Aristotle

Experience suggested that the more members of mankind there were assembled in some grouping, the more likely that grouping is to encompass within itself all the differences that divide mankind at large; until, at the point where it included all mankind, those differences would become indistinguishable from the differences that divide mankind as it is.

  • Michael Frayn in The Human Touch

We suffer more in imagination than in reality.

  • Seneca

A novel is like a violinist’s bow; the belly of the violin that gives back the sounds is the reader’s soul.

  • Stendhal

Yaadhanin Yaadhanin neengiyaan nodhal
adhanin adhanin ilan

(That for which you feel no attachment can cause you no sorrow.)

  • Kural no. 341, quoted by Ilayaraja during an interview in May, 2019.

In quantum mechanics, uncertainty is a precise thing.

  • Paul Davies and John Gribbin, in The Matter Myth
    (Context: …’and the energy of the short lived [virtual] quantum is determined by the duration of its existence, and vice versa – shorter-lived quanta can have more energy than longer-lived quanta, so that the product of energy and duration is always less than the time limit set by quantum rules’. This refers to the virtual quantum particles that pop into existence from ‘nothing’ and then disappear, continually.)

You’re more likely to act yourself into feeling than feeling yourself into action.

  • Dr. Jerome Bruner, a Harvard psychologist

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

  • Alan Watts

Follow the person who is seeking the truth and run from the one who has found it.

  • Persian saying

Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.

  • Voltaire

Anyone who believes in indefinite growth of anything physical on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist

  • Kenneth Bowling (?)

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

  • St Augustine

A healthy person has a hundred wishes, but a sick person has only one.

  • Old Indian proverb (found in Pandemic by A G Riddle)

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..

  • John Milton

When Mozart was my age, he’d been dead for two years…

  • Tom Lehrer (about achievement)

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

  • Winston Churchill

Simplicity in habit, truth in speech,
Be these the daily strengtheners of their minds!
May books and nature be their early joy!
And knowledge, rightly honoured with that name,
Knowledge not purchased by the loss of power!

  • Wordsworth

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

  • W B Yeats

Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It cannot be any other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.

  • Albert Einstein

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all
those words and sentences that in all your
reading have been to you like the blast of a
trumpet out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John, and Paul.

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have the found the missing link between apes and humans. It’s us.

  • (I don’t remember who said this – found in Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways.)

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

  • Richard Skinner (There appear to be several Richard Skinners, don’t know which one this is)

Some days you’re the pigeon, some days you’re the statue.

  • Unknown

I know a picture is done when I stop staring at it, and it starts staring back at me.

  • (An artist, a famous one, don’t remember the name)

Let us live well so that we may die well. Because we’ve never been closer to death than at this very moment.

  • (From the movie The Professor, spoken by Johnny Depp’s character)

Insanity — a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.

  • R D Laing (Scottish psychologist)

Vakyam rasatmakam vachakam

  • Sahitya Darpana, Viswanatha

I seem to be a verb.

  • Buckminster Fuller

The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight.

  • Malcolm Gladwell

What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

  • Italo Calvino

100% of the shots you don’t take don’t go in!

  • Wayne Gretzky (hockey player, quote found in The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond)

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

  • Voltaire

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?

  • Robert Browning

Nothing more than taking a line for a walk.

  • Paul Klee, on drawing.

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison –
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.

  • Philip Larkin in the poem ‘Toads’

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

  • Gene Fowler

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.

  • Steve Jobs

In spring, hundreds of flowers; in autumn, a harvest moon;

In summer, a refreshing breeze; in winter, snow will accompany you.

If useless things do not hang in your mind,
Any season is a good season for you.

  • Mumon, in his commentary to the Zen koan ‘Everyday life is the path’.

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence not imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

  • Amadeus Mozart

…it’s like this. Sometimes, when you’ve a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly long it is and feel sure you’ll never get it swept. And then you start to hurry. You work faster and faster and every time you look up there seems to be just as much left to sweep as before, and you try even harder, and you panic, and in the end you’re out of breath and have to stop–and still the street stretches away in front of you. That’s not the way to do it.

You must never think of the whole street at once, understand? You must only concentrate on the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom, and the next, and the next. Nothing else.

That way you enjoy your work, which is important, because then you make a good job of it. And that’s how it ought to be.

And all at once, before you know it, you find you’ve swept the whole street clean, bit by bit. what’s more, you aren’t out of breath. That’s important, too…

  • Michael Ende, Momo

Letting go is the lesson. Letting go is always the lesson. Have you ever noticed how much of our agony is all tied up with craving and loss?

  • Susan Gordon Amadeus Mozart

When you catch yourself slipping into a pool of negativity, notice how it derives from nothing other than resistance to the current situation.

  • Donna Quesada

When it is understood that one loses joy and happiness in the attempt to possess them, the essence of natural farming will be realized. The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.

  • Masanobu Fukuoka

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

  • Bruce Lee

A lion chased up a tree and I greatly enjoyed the view from the top.

The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute, the man who does not ask is a fool for life.

To see a thing that you know and know that you know it, and to see a thing that you do not know and know that you do not know it, that is true knowledge.

It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop.

What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others.

To be truly happy and contented, you must let go of what it means to be happy and contented.

We have two lives, and the second begins when we realise that we only have one.

Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.

  • Confucius

Those who lose dreaming are lost.

  • Australian aboriginal proverb

A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain
And drinking largely sobers us again.

  • Alexander Pope (from An Essay on Criticism)

Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

  • G K Chesterton