“You don’t know how lucky you are being a monkey. Because consciousness is a terrible curse. I think. I feel. I suffer.” - Being John Malkovich, 1999
Do you think a hen is ordinary? Well, imagine you were a lone spaceman crisscrossing back and forth through outer space. Even if you travelled for an eternity, you’d be lucky to see a single hen.
There are billions and billions of stars in the vast expanse of outer space we call the universe. A few of these stars have a planet or two moving round and round them on a set path called an orbit. After traveling for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, you might possibly get to a planet with life on it. But even if there were living things there, the chances of findings a hen are extremely slim. You just might find an egg, but I doubt that a chicken would hatch out of it.
There are probably no hens anywhere else in the universe except on our own earth. And the universe is unimaginably vast! So we can hardly call a hen ordinary!
— Jostein Gaarder, Hello? Is anybody There?
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
— David Eagleman, Sum
Sir Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel Prize-winning poet, once said, “I have on my table a violin string. It is free. But it is not free to do what a violin string is supposed to do – to produce music. So I take it, fix it in my violin and tighten it until it is taut. Only then is it free to be a violin string.” By the same token we are free when our lives are uncommitted, but not to be what we were intended to be. Real freedom is not freedom from, but freedom for.
— Robert W. Youngs
The whole point of reading for enlightenment is not the number of books you read but how well you read them.
Abraham Lincoln read only a few books but he read them very well. And the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, said, “If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.”
— Mortimer Adler
Unbalanced Life
“it’s not for lack of love of the language that these films [ Qatsi trilogy ] have no words. It’s because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live.”
— Godfrey Reggio
Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
— George Orwell (via philphys)
The final reason that I have identified for the growing recognition of GTD is one that I doubt I can explain in nice, concise terms, for it involves the more subtle arenas of psychology, aesthetics, and spirituality. I don’t claim to have any significant expertise in any of these fields, but there is an aspect of GTD and its expression that seems to resonate with something deeper and more meaningful than simply the specifics of the topics and contents with which it coaches people to work. I will be bold enough to suggest that GTD approaches the world in much the same way that art, psychology, and spirituality have: as a framework to understand and experience new levels and depths of truth and reality.
— Making It All work, David Allen
