The Story Of A Saint
Quotable Quotes
Home | Rabindra Sangeet | About Me | my Engg College | Favorite Links | Poems I like | Short Stories | Favorite Novel bits | Photos | My Favorite Writers | Cartoons | Nobel Lectures | Own Works | Favorite Paintings | Quotable Quotes | favorite Film Stars | Friends | contact me

Following are some great quotes

"Do you know what I learned from you? I learned what is possible, and now I must hold out for what I thought we had. I want to be very close to someone I respect and admire and have somebody who feels the same way about me. That or nothing. I realized that what I'm looking for is not what you're looking for. You don't want what I want."
"What do you think I want?" I asked.
"Exactly what you have. Many women you know a little and don't care very much about. Superficial flirtations mutual use, no chance of love. That's my idea of hell. Hell is a place, a time, a consciousness, Richard, in which there is no love. Horrible! Leave me out of it."
-- Richard Bach (The Bridge Across Forever)

Heaven and Earth are as old as Me
And the ten thousand things are One
(Frithyoff Capra)

It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.
-Mahathma Gandhi-

"In the domain of political economy, free scientific inquiry does not merely meet the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with summons to the fray on the opposing side the most violent, sordid and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest. The Established church, for instance, will more readily pardon an attack on thirty-eight of its thirty-nine articles than on one thirty-ninth of its income"
Karl Marx(Capital, vol.1. p92).


"A man may break a word with you, sir and words are but wind, and break it in your face, so he break it not behind."
William Shakespeare

The Guru (Preceptor) will give you the Name and the Form suited to your temperament and samskaras. If the Guru commands you under a threat and orders you to adopt a line of Sadhana (Spiritual Effort) declaring This is my Aajna,(This is My Command), then you can tell him that the main thing is your satisfaction, not his. You have to do the Sadhana in an atmosphere of joy and contentment.
(sathya sai Baba)

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." (Abraham Lincoln)

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
(Nausea - Jean Paul Sartre)

admit the defeat and learn from the defeat
(Vladimir Illich Lenin)

"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I
gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take
more than one night.' " -- Charlie Brown.

If you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
(Kahlil Gibran)

winners Don't do different things
They do things differently
(Shiv khera)

"Nothing prevents our denying life by suicide. well then, kill yourself, and you won't discuss. If life displeases you, kill yourself! You live, and cannot understand the meaning of life - then finish it, and do not fool about in life, saying and writing that you do not understand it. You have come into good company where people are contented and know what they are doing; if you find it dull and repulsive - go away!" (Leo Tolstoy- in one of his confessions)

"The truth is that after several decades of neoliberalism, the rich are becoming increasingly richer while the poor are both more numerous and increasingly poorer."
(Fidel Castro)

Dasa Koopa Samo Vaapi
Dasa vaapi samo hridha:
Dasa hridha samo puthra
Dasa puthra samo druma
(Vrikshayurvedam) 

{Ten wells are equal to one pond 
Ten Ponds are equal to a backwater 
Ten Backwaters equal to a Son 
Ten Sons are equal to a Tree}

What we know is not much; what we do not know is immense
(French Scientist: Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace)

I do not know what I seem to the world, but to myself I appear to have been like a boy playing upon the seashore and diverting myself and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay before me all undiscovered.(Sir Issac Newton)

Better is the sinner who hath thoughts about God, than the saint who hath only the show of sanctity.
(Persian Poet: Sadi)

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived. (George S. Patton, Jr.)

We cannot banish dangers, but we can banish fears. We must not demean life by standing in awe of death.
(David Sarnoff)

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.(Charles Darwin)

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.(Albert Einstein)

I need no gravestone, but
If you need one for me
I would like it bear these words
He made suggstions. We
carried them out
Such an inscription would
honor us all(Berthold Brecht)

Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery. Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being
(Franz Kafka)

Krishna who is known as Govinda is the Supreme Godhead. He has an eternal blissful spiritual body. He is the origin of all. He has no other origin and He is the prime cause of all causes.
(BagavathGeetha)

Philosophy appears to some people as a homogenous milieu: there thoughts are born and die, there systems are built, and there, in turn, they collapse. Others take Philosophy for a specific attitude which we can freely adopt at will. Still others see it as a determined segment of culture. In our view Philosophy does not exist.
(Jean Paul Sartre)

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."
- George Bernard Shaw

"History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.
- Bertie C. Forbes

"Honesty is the cornerstone of all success, without which confidence and ability to perform shall cease to exist."
- Mary Kay Ash

"Look at a day when you are supremely satisfied at the end. It's not a day when you lounge around doing nothing; it's when you've had everything to do, and you've done it."
- Margaret Thatcher

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear."
- Mark Twain

Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames
-Thomas Moore

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances." -- Victor Frankl

"This is the true joy in life: the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations." -- George Bernard Shaw

You can learn from an ordinary bamboo leaf what ought to happen. It bends lower and lower under the weight of snow. Suddenly the snow slips to the ground without the leaf having stirred. Stay like that at the highest point of tension until the shot falls from you. So, indeed , it is: when the tension is fulfilled, the shot must fall, it must fall from the archer like snow from a bamboo leaf, before he even thinks it. (Eugen Herrigel)

Herrigel was a German Philospher who studied the Art of Archery under a Zen Master in Japan

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat
Theodore Roosevelt

"The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me."
(George Bernard Shaw)

One metaphor I find that's helpful is to think about a garden. If you have a weed that is 1/2 an inch tall, it is easy to pluck it out. However, if you wait till it's 6 feet tall , you need a whole landscaping crew to remove it. Similarly , the mind can start to fall into certain states such as anger or depression, and it's good to nip it in the bud at the beginning. It's much more difficult to get out of a funk after you dig yourself deeply into it. Stopping any habit is easier before it mushrooms.
( a ZEN quote)

Nature! We are enveloped and embraced by her, incapable of emerging from her and incapable of entering her more deeply. Unbidden and unwarned, she receives us into the circuits of her dance, drifting onward with us herself, until we grow tired and drop from her arms.

From inaccessible mountain range by way of desert untrod by human foot to the ends of the unknown seas, the breath of the everlasting creative spirit is felt, rejoicing over every speck of dust that hearkens to it and lives.

It is quite beyond me how anyone can believe God speaks to us in books and stories. If the world does not directly reveal to us our relationship to it, if our hearts fail to tell us what we owe ourselves and others, we shall assuredly not learn it from books, which are at best designed but to give names to our errors.

Since I have heard often enough that everyone in the end has his own religion, nothing seemed more natural to me than to fashion my own.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on how one looks at it.

Our desires presage the capacities within us; they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is indeed possible into dreamt-for reality

By nature we have no defect that could not become a strength, no strength that could not become a defect.

The passing day is prey to error. Time commands success and achievement

Nothing is worse than active ignorance

Each has his own happiness in his hands, as the artist handles the rude clay he seeks to reshape it into a figure; yet it is the same with this art as with all others: only the capacity for it is innate; the art itself must be learned and painstakingly practiced.

Once one knows what really matters, one ceases to be voluble. And what does really matter? That is easy: thinking and doing, doing and thinking---and these are the sum of all wisdom...Both must move ever onward in life, to and fro, like breathing in and breathing out. Whoever makes it a rule to test action by thought, thought by action, cannot falter, and if he does, will soon find his way back to the right road.

Truth is a torch but a tremendous one. That is why we hurry past it, shielding our eyes, indeed, in fear of getting burned.

We cannot possess what we do not understand.

Hypotheses are lullabies for teachers to sing their students to sleep. The close and thoughtful observer more and more learns to recognize his limitations. He realizes that with the steady growth of knowledge more and more new problems keep on emerging.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge--unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable."

--Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," (Spring, 1940)

Quotes from Sama Vedha

The people shrewd in policy may praise or criticise;
The godess of wealth (Lakshmi) may come or leave with her desire;
Death may come today or after thousand years,
But the patient people never leave the path of justice.


The godess of wealth (Lakshmi) herself (or money itself) comes to those ;
who are motivated; who are not lazy,
who know the method of work, who are free of bad habits
who are brave, grateful, kind hearted and full of perseverance.

On this earth there is no better treasure than the donation,
no worse enemy than the temptation,
no better jewelry than the beautiful character and nature,
no better wealth than the contentment.

Only an exceptional mother gives birth to a child,
who does not get happy on reception of wealth
who does not get sad on the arrival of bad times,
who does not become a coward in a war beacuse of fear.
The child with such qualities is a crown of the world.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Mahatma Gandhi said that seven things will destroy us. Notice that all of them have to do with social and political conditions. Note also that the antidote of each of these "deadly sins" is an explicit external standard or something that is based on natural principles and laws, not on social values.

Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Knowledge without character
Commerce (business) without morality (ethics)
Science without humanity
Religion without sacrifice
Politics without principle

 

Enter supporting content here