Words That Have Changed You.

[panic in paradise]

lets have another quote thread...

and add some passages or paragraphs from books, movies, plays, things that people have said to you that have touched, shook, or changed your way of thinking, your life, or just brings a smile to your face at random times.

ill start with that i love you, every morning, and at the end of every night. -

after a black out, my friends mom asking if i remember what i did last night, and me saying "no, why?!?" and her standing up from the couch and saying "if you cant remember, you dont deserve to know." and walking away. - ouch

and a bit from a book i picked up recently entitled Ecopsychology; this chapter was written by steven harper:

"wilderness is a leaderless teacher; there is no one preaching to change us. the only personal transformations that occur arise from with in ourselves.

my hope is that ecopsychology will opt for seeing the split between nature and human nature as needing a healing process, rather then therapy as i have described it, recognizing that we are, in a sense, prefigured by nature. our relationship with natuer is more one of being then having. we are nature; we do not have nature, as alan watts one expressed it: "you didnt come into this world. you came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. you are not a stranger here."

- good book so far

 

[ocean]

Yay for quotes.....
Words that changed my life.....
"I do."...... "I love you"
- The most wonderful man in the world

"Every walk to the woods is a religious rite, every bath in the stream is a saving ordinance. Communion service is at all hours, and the bread and wine are from the heart and marrow of Mother Earth. To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter...to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring—these are some of the rewards of the simple life. The most precious things of life are near at hand, without money and without price. Each of you has the whole wealth of the universe at your very door. All that I ever had, and still have, may be yours by stretching forth your hand and taking it. "

-John Burroughs (1837-1921) American Writer and naturalist

"If you think about all the gains our society has made, from independence to now, it wasn't government. It was activism.
People think, 'Oh, Teddy Roosevelt established Yosemite National Park, what a great president.' BS. It was John Muir who invited Roosevelt out and then convinced him to ditch his security and go camping. It was Muir, an activist, a single person."

-- Patagonia founder and outdoor enthusiast Yvon Chouinard in a ( recent Sierra Magazine interview).


I love quotes.....very glad for this thread

 

[Crankinit]

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It's not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Consider this, 92% of the worlds population feel that their lives could be better, what about you? If you could do anything, anything at all... what would you do? What are you doing now? Imagine that you could live your life knowing it could not be better and never feeling that you would rather be doing something else, be somewhere else, or be someone else. Now consider this, some people actually live that way and so could you. Contemplate this, what if 90% of the problems you encountered in your life were mere illusion and only existed in your mind? In your everyday life whenever something annoys you, stresses you, makes you mad or makes you sad, consider if that something really matters. Will you even remember how you felt in 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year, or what about in 10 years? So when the people you work for pressure you and fail to understand you does it really matter? And when they call you on the phone screaming and yelling does it matter? And should you really allow that to influence your life? It's all about choices.

"The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly colored and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question, is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say, "Hey - don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride..." And we... kill those people.

"We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up. Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and my family. This just has to be real." Just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn't matter because: It's just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It's only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defences each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace. Thank you very much, you've been great."

Bill Hicks (December 16, 1961 -- February 26, 1994)

Just a few quotes I've come across that hit me pretty hard.

 

[BrahamCracker]

probably

"You are a drug addict" from a friend

really changed my view on drugs and i quit

 

[ocean]

Crankinit.....the first quote on fear is great!
The second one is also really cool- I think of that all the time and it makes my problems look small. I do ask myself- in one year....will this matter? in ten? puts things in perspective.


and bill hicks is cool
............................................................................

When I heard
"well....your blood tests have come back-and....you're pregnant."
that changed me forever. it was the most incredible feeling in the world......

and also when i heard ....."it looks likie a spontaneous abortion....there is no baby there"
that changed me forever.

 

[panic in paradise]

^


crankinit, the general idea of all 3 of your quotes run through my mind daily in one form or another, of course ive seen that performance and read that bill hicks quote many a time, but who where the other 2 by?

btw, i had no f'n clue bill hicks was 33! when he died... wow.

 

[BadHabbit]

at the bar an old biker once told me, get on your bike ride like theres no tomorrow and live like todays going out of style... it truely did change my life because i realized its the moment that matters...

 

[thujone]

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

 

[slimvictor]

Some quotes by Einstein that have affected me:

- Imagination is more important than knowledge.
- Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.
- The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
- 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.

And a few short poems / excerpts from Rumi:

--
Humble living does not diminish. It fills.
Going back to a simpler self gives wisdom.

When a man makes up a story for his child,
he becomes a father and a child
together, listening.

--

Death is not bitter to those who know.
If an earthquake opens the prison walls,
do you think an escaping prisoner
will complain of the damage done
to the stone and marble-work?


--

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you’ve been bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
You would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.

 

[Pillthrill]

From a converation a friend had with me one night:

Men in particular need to look past all your imperfections and mental flaws to see that beauty is trapped inside you and only a great person daring enough to tempt it will be able to get it out of you to full understand your greatness.

I've always seen myself as like the angel from Dogma that with the wings ripped off....but I never did it..others did a part a time, and now the bleeding never stops and to be touched can be extremely painful. Others see those things and it scares them, and I can't fly away from it anymore even though I want to.

You need to know that whomever keeps your heart someday will have a pair of wings waiting for you because he will be able to help you forget about problems of your current life and all you'll think about is love for him and the love he has to give for you.

 

[junctionalfunkie]

"When you make your own mother cry, maybe it's time to change your lifestlye." My Heroin Mentor, back when he was alive.


"Last night, I turned around and thought I saw myself turning,
Inside the strangest dream of life unloved and cities burning" - Smashing Pumpkins


"Everything flows. Nothing stands still." - Heraclitus


"When a Man stops believing in God he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes in Everything." - GK Chesterton

 

[panic in paradise]

"When a Man stops believing in God he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes in Everything." - GK Chesterton

*raises eye brows*

you should be familiar with these words junctionalfunkie, Williamson County - they kept my life for a looong time. bad words.

 

[Crankinit]

^


crankinit, the general idea of all 3 of your quotes run through my mind daily in one form or another, of course ive seen that performance and read that bill hicks quote many a time, but who where the other 2 by?

btw, i had no f'n clue bill hicks was 33! when he died... wow.

Crankinit.....the first quote on fear is great!
The second one is also really cool- I think of that all the time and it makes my problems look small. I do ask myself- in one year....will this matter? in ten? puts things in perspective.

Yeah Bill Hicks was an amazing man. Sadly I don't have a source for the first two quotes, I have a notepad document on my desktop where I save anything I come across online that hits me particularly hard (just passages, quotes, poems, whatever). I don't have a source listed for either of those two so they must have been quoted as is without any info on where they came from, sadly

The first one particularly resonates with me, I think because my own life is one that has been ruled so much by my own fear and doubt, reading that kind of puts my own insecurities in perspective and casts them as the destructive illusions that they are.

 

[drug_wench]

'the evil that men do lives on and on' - Iron Maiden

'i chose to be friends with Lydia not Methamphetamine' - anonymous friend who hung in there for me

 

[izzy66]

"there was nothing we could do.he never knew what hit him.
i'm sorry but your husband is dead."
-doctor at the ER

I dreamed it the night before. if only I could have made him understand...

 

[junctionalfunkie]

*raises eye brows*

you should be familiar with these words junctionalfunkie, Williamson County - they kept my life for a looong time. bad words.

Please to explain, sir.

This is probably the most oft-misquoted line in all of philosophical literature. As an undergraduate philosophy student, I (like many others) took it as an atheist's creed. The wording is quite misleading.

See here: http://chesterton.org/qmeister2/any-everything.htm

I always thought it meant, that when a man's mind is freed from the shackles of religion, it is free to contemplate anything. Apparently, no one is really sure what Chesterton meant by it, But as he was a notorious anti-Semite and (eek) Christian sympathizer, it's probably safe to assume his intended meaning was less-than-enlightened.

Glad you called my attention to it, I might have gone on quoting (or misquoting) it for the rest of my life.

Still, I'm intrigued by your statement..... who/what kept your life for a long time? You used to live in the Texas Hill Country, didn't you? Is that the "Williamson County" you refer to? Wilco is an absolute shithole (no offense if that's where you're from )

I'll leave the quote up as a curiosity, but I'll replace it with another old favorite of mine:

"The fool says in his heart that there is no god; the wise man shouts it from the rooftops." - Unknown

Growing up an atheist in rural Texas, I tended to collect these gems. I was not popular.

 

[panic in paradise]

Growing up an atheist in rural Texas, I tended to collect these gems. I was not popular.

not too popular, i would imagine not.

yes, wilco, specifically their judicial system and jail/institutions. the rest of the time i was on guadeloupe, parts of lamar, rundberg, and the 6th st area, riverside dr neighborhoods, but mostly N. atx.

heres a good one, a phrase, or statement, that once heard will change your life, and how you respond the words you reply with will change your life:

"anything you say can and will be used against you."



head to the pacific north west while its not too late!

 

[ocean]

Knowledge of life in the astral world leads us to a conclusion of fundamental importance, namely that the physical world is the product of the astral world.
Rudolf Steiner

Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life. John Muir

 

[junctionalfunkie]

head to the pacific north west while its not too late!

Ha, we've talked about this before man, I moved here from Seattle in May!

July and August are beautiful. The rest if the year, you can keep that weather. I lived on Bainbridge for a while.The geography is breathtaking. Saw some shows at The Gorge a couple times....

But, in March, when I was considering throwing myself off the Mercer Street bridge on a daily basis, I decided it was time to come back to Texas.

 

[Lysis]

I love the movie Closer. This is the same scene. I also love anything by Oscar Wilde.

Larry: So Anna tells me your bloke wrote a book. Any good?
Alice: Of course.
Larry: It's about you isn't it?
Alice: Some of me.
Larry: Oh? What did he leave out?
Alice: The truth.

Larry: [on a photography exhibit] What do you think?
Alice: It's a lie. It's a bunch of sad strangers photographed beautifully, and... all the glittering assholes who appreciate art say it's beautiful 'cause that's what they wanna see. But the people in the photos are sad, and alone... But the pictures make the world seem beautiful, so... the exhibition is reassuring which makes it a lie, and everyone loves a big fat lie.
Larry: I'm the big fat liar's boyfriend.
Alice: Bastard!