- Wikipedia article on Wabi-sabi

“17. Life is bittersweet, and bittersweetness is greatly to be preferred to pure sweetness.
In the classic iconography of Heaven, everyone is 33 years old, everyone looks the same, and everything is oddly dead, like a plastic flower on a grave. In real life, we love imperfections, irregularities, beauty spots, and signs of frailty or age. The mortal actual is far more lovable than the ideal.”

- Don Cupitt, The Religion of Ordinary Life*

* This is quite fascinating to read in full and contains some ideas that I find very freeing. Thanks to James for sending this my way!

“Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.”
- Robert A. Heinlein

“The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.”
- Richard Dawkins

“For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”
- Carl Sagan

(Thanks to @SaganSchools for these wonderful quotes)

“The right idea has the power to overcome any challenge. We can always find that idea.”

- Ray Kurzweil

There is no such thing as THE truth. We’ve already gone over that. Let it be enough that you get in touch with YOUR truth.”

- Neale Donald Walsch in Home with God.

“We keep on climbing
But we never find the top
It’s all downhill from here.”

- The Evens, ‘Shelter Two’

“I will stop living life for a future happiness that does not & may never exist. I will live for now & stop wasting my time. Every moment I live can be as beautiful as a fantasy. Every second of life is precious. I vow to stop wasting my time on these dreams that turn my life into a nightmare. I vow to live, to be mindful, to pay attention to life & hold it hard to my heart. Every beat another second going by.”

- Margaret Cho

“Everything passes away – suffering, pain, blood, hunger; pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes toward the stars? Why?”

- Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard

“Anything can be creative — you bring that quality to the activity. Activity itself is neither creative nor uncreative. You can paint in an uncreative way. You can sing in an uncreative way. You can clean the floor in a creative way. You can cook in a creative way.

Creativity is the quality that you bring to the activity you are doing. It is an attitude, an inner approach — how you look at things.”

“Not everybody can be a painter — and there is no need also. If everybody is a painter the world will be very ugly; it will be difficult to live. And not everybody can be a dancer, and there is no need. But everybody can be creative.

Whatsoever you do, if you do it joyfully, if you do it lovingly, if your act of doing it is not purely economical, then it is creative. If you have something growing out of it within you, if it gives you growth, it is spiritual, it is creative, it is divine.”

“We destroy creativity. Nobody is born uncreative, but we make ninety-nine percent of people uncreative.

But just throwing the responsibility on the society is not going to help — you have to take your life in your own hands. You have to drop wrong conditionings. You have to drop wrong, hypnotic auto-suggestions that have been given to you in your childhood. Drop them! Purify yourself of all conditionings… and suddenly you will see you are creative. To be and to be creative are synonymous. It is impossible to be and not to be creative.”

“People have a very limited idea of what being creative is — playing the guitar or the flute or writing poetry — so people go on writing rubbish in the name of poetry. You have to find out what you can do and what you cannot do. Everybody cannot do everything! You have to search and find your destiny. You have to grope in the dark, I know. It is not very clear-cut what your destiny is — but that’s how life is. And it is good that one has to search for it — in the very search, something grows.”

“If God were to give a chart of your life to you when you were entering into the world — this will be your life: you are going to become a guitarist — then your life would be mechanical. Only a machine can be predicted, not a man. Man is unpredictable. Man is always an opening… a potentiality for a thousand and one things. Many doors open and many alternatives are always present at each step — and you have to choose, you have to feel. But if you love your life you will be able to find.”

“Each man comes into this world with a specific destiny — he has something to fulfill, some message has to be delivered, some work has to be completed. You are not here accidentally — you are here meaningfully. There is a purpose behind you. The Whole intends to do something through you.”

Little doggy looks out over Edinburgh from Blackford Hill

“I wish we could get our act together
Make some sense of present tense, alright
Take our time with what we find and feel it
Don’t you know there’s some place else that we can go
A billion trees to climb”

- Stephen Malkmus, ‘Us’

Os Gemeos wall mural, Coney Island

There’s no common goal
There’s no moral action
There’s no modern age
From which to run away

- Stephen Malkmus, ‘We Can’t Help You’

Been listening to a lot of Stephen Malkmus’ solo work lately. It’s quite brilliant.

“If you want to freely live or die, go or stay, to take off or put on your clothes, then right now recognize the person who is listening to this discourse. That one is without form, without characteristics, without root, without source, and without any dwelling place, yet is brisk and lively. As for all the manifold responsive activities, the place where they are carried on is, in fact, no place. Therefore, when you look for him, he retreats farther and farther; when you seek him, he turns more and more the other way: this is called the “Mystery.””

- Linji (d.866)