The best-remembered teachers are the tough ones, who discipline our intellects for the longest journeys.

Annis Pratt

“learn the art of patience. Apply discipline to your thoughts when they become anxious over the outcome of a goal. Impatience breeds anxiety, fear, discouragement and failure. Patience creates confidence, decisiveness, and a rational outlook, which eventually leads to success.”
― Brian Adams

Gambling makes boys selfish and cruel as well as men.

― Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays

“In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself—all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married.”
― Isak Dinesen

The beautiful journey of today can only begin when we learn to let go of yesterday.”

― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

The first step to change,… is accepting your reality right now. Honouring your process. Compassionate self-awareness leads to change; harsh self-criticism only holds the pattern in place, creating a stubborn and defensive Basic Self. Be gentle with yourself as you would with a child. Be gentle but firm. Give yourself the space to grow. But remember that the timing is in god’s hands, not yours.

― Dan Millman, Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior

Opportunity dances with those who are already on the dance floor.

H. Jackson Brown Jr.

“And I’ll dance with you in Vienna,
I’ll be wearing a river’s disguise.
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder
my mouth on the dew of your thighs.
And I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
with the photographs there and the moss.
And I’ll yield to the flood of your beauty,
my cheap violin and my cross.”
― Leonard Cohen, Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs

Count not what is lost, but what is left.

“If someone is not treating you with love and respect, it is a gift if they walk away from you. If that person doesn’t walk away, you will surely endure many years of suffering with him or her. Walking away may hurt for a while, but your heart will eventually heal. Then you can choose what you really want. You will find that you don’t need to trust others as much as you need to trust yourself to make the right choices.”

― Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.

Carl Sandburg

“Once when I looked up, I happened to see a sea eagle poised on magisterial wings above the knurled summit of the mountain behind my tent. It was a scene of peerless tranquility, tossed out in Nature’s devil-may-care way, which says: Just open your eyes, my friend, and I’ll astonish you every minute of your life.”

― Lawrence Millman, Last Places: A Journey in the North

A stumble is not a fall.

Proverbs from Haiti

“When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”

― Arthur Conan Doyle

Travel changes you.

As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life – and travel – leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks – on your body or on your heart – are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.”
― Anthony Bourdain, The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear. The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all. From now on you’ll be travelling the road between who you think you are and who you can be. The key is to allow yourself to make the journey.”

― Meg Cabot

To Quarrel With a Drunk Is To Wrong a Man Who Is Not There

“Once upon a time, powerful wizard, who wanted to destroy an entire kingdom, placed a magic potion in the well from which the inhabitants drank. Whoever drank that water would go mad.

The following morning, the whole population drank from the well and they all went mad, apart from the king and his family, who had a well set aside for them alone, which the magician had not managed to poison. The king was worried and tried to control the population by issuing a series of edicts governing security and public health. The policemen and the inspectors, however, had also drunk the poisoned water, and they thought the king’s decisions were absurd and resolved to take notice of them.

When the inhabitants of the kingdom heard these decrees, they became convinced that the king had gone mad and was now giving nonsensical orders. The marched on the castle and called for his abdication.

In despair the king prepared to step down from the throne, but the queen stopped him, saying: ‘Let us go and drink from the communal well. Then we will be the same as them.’

And that was what they did: The king and queen drank the water of madness and immediately began talking nonsense. Their subjects repented at once; now that the king was displaying such ‘wisdom’, why not allow him to rule the country?

The country continued to live in peace, although its inhabitants behaved very differently from those of its neighbors. And the king was able to govern until the end of his days.”

― Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die

the real “work” of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me.

To gently push aside and silence the many voices that question my goodness and to trust that I will hear the voice of blessing– that demands real effort. ”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World

“What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.”

― C.S. Lewis

Don’t try to fly before you have wings. French

“When you come to the edge of all that you know, you must believe one of two things: either there will be ground to stand on, or you will be given wings to fly.”
― O.R. Melling, The Summer King

You can’t ride two horses with one behind. Woody Allen

The one best precept-
the golden rule in dealing with a horse
-is never to approach him angrily.
Anger is so devoid of forethought
that it will often drive a man to do things
which in a calmer mood he will regret.

    – Xenophon –

Snake to snake, see the leg

http://www.myanmars.net/myanmar-language/myanmar-proverbs.htm

“Feebleness of will brings about weakness of head, and the abyss, in spite of its horror, comes to fascinate us, as though it were a place of refuge. Terrible danger! For this abyss is within us; this gulf, open like the vast jaws of an infernal serpent bent on devouring us, is in the depth of our own being, and our liberty floats over this void, which is always seeking to swallow it up.”

― Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Amiel’s Journal

Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace. Gautama Buddha

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.”

― Melody Beattie

Hounds follow those who feed them.

― Otto von Bismarck

“Haunted by demons of the past, hounded by demons not yet met, the nevermore and evermore left her little peace.”

A Tale of Two Women”
Kimberly Kinrade, Bits of You & Pieces of Me

there’s a bluebird in my heart that, wants to get out but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke and the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks never know that he’s in there

Charles Bukowski

“the psyche has been burned
and left us senseless,
the world has been darker than lights-out
in a closet full of hungry bats,
and the whiskey and wine entered our veins
when blood was too weak to carry on”

― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

The world is a globe — the farther you sail, the closer to home you are.

Terry Pratchett, Nation

“blessing the boats
(at saint mary’s)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back
may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that”

― Lucille Clifton

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind. Friedrich Nietzsche

“But the Australians, what do the Australians do? How do they structure their landscape? For a start they postulate a primal builder, whose work they presume only to interpret: the mythical animal who was active in the “dreamtime,” that is, a primal era, beyond verification, as the name indicates. A time of sleep. The visible landscape is an effect of causes that are to be found in the dreamtime. For example, the snake that dragged itself over this plain creating these undulations, etc., etc. These.. curious Aborigines make sure their eyes are closed while events take place, which allows them to see places as records of events. But what they see is a kind of dream, and they wake into a reverie, since the real story (the snake, not the hills) happened while they were asleep.”

― César Aira, Ghosts

Words are cold, muddy toads trying to understand sprites dancing in a field-but they’re all we have.

― Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil

“The smell of that buttered toast simply spoke to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cozy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one’s ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleepy canaries.”

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

Pride, anger, gluttony, and idleness are sometimes conquered, but the conversion of a malicious and envious mind is a kind of miracle.

― Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont

“He grinned. “I was trying to remember all the deadly sins the other day,” he said. “Greed,envy, gluttony, irony, pedantry…”
“I’m pretty sure irony isn’t a deadly sin.”
“I’m pretty sure it is.”
“Lust,” she said. “Lust is a deadly sin.”
“And spanking.”
“I think that falls under lust.”
“I think it should have its own category,” said Jace. “Greed, envy, gluttony, irony, pedantry, lust, and spanking.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Lost Souls

“A guy can do far far worse than surrounding himself with people who restore his faith in humanity.”

― David Levithan, Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares

“The work of restoration cannot begin until a problem is fully faced.”

― Dan B. Allender

“The difference between mad people and sane people . . . is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.”

― Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace

“Meditation begins now, right here. It can’t begin someplace else or at some other time. To paraphrase the great Zen master Dogen, “If you want to practice awareness, then practice awareness without delay.” If you wish to know a mind that is tranquil and clear, sane and peaceful, you must take it up now. If you wish to free yourself from the frantic television mind that runs our lives, begin with the intention to be present now.

Nobody can bring awareness to your life but you.

Meditation is not a self-help program–a way to better ourselves so we can get what we want. Nor is it a way to relax before jumping back into busyness. It’s not something to do once in awhile, either, whenever you happen to feel like it.

Instead, meditation is a practice that saturates your life and in time can be brought into every activity. It is the transformation of mind from bondage to freedom.

In practicing meditation, we go nowhere other than right here where we now stand, where we now sit, where we now live and breathe. In meditation we return to where we already are–this shifting, changing ever-present now.

― Steve Hagen, Meditation Now or Never

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. ― Rumi

“This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn in the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown.”

― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. ― Leonardo da Vinci

“I’m somewhat socially inept. Slide me between two strangers at any light-hearted jamboree and I’ll either rock awkwardly and silently on my heels, or come out with a stone-cold conversation-killer like, “This room’s quite rectangular, isn’t it?” I glide through the social whirl with all the elegance of a dog in high heels”

― Charlie Brooker

Frequent visits cause disrespect.

http://sanskrit-quote.blogspot.com.au/

“This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor…Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honourably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”
― Rumi

A man should avoid these six evils: lust, anger, avarice pleasure, pride, and rashness, for free of these he may be happy. (Sanskrit).

I Came to buy a smile—today—But just a single smile—The smallest one upon your faceWill suit me just as well—The one that no one else would missIt shone so very small—I’m pleading at the “counter”—…

Source: A man should avoid these six evils: lust, anger, avarice pleasure, pride, and rashness, for free of these he may be happy. (Sanskrit). | THE OLD PROVERBIAL RECOVERY

Bunny’s Excuse. There was once a wicked old sinner Who fancied a rabbit for dinner, But the bunny he met Said: “Don’t kill me yet, For I really am still a beginner.”

My living problems also cease to be struggles.

Heaven designs to suit our trials to our strength.

Though the sun shines, leave not your cloak at home.

” The queen’s mocking laughter cut in. “This is your treasure, Lord Sheftu?”

“Aye. The greatest treasure in Egypt—a maid whose loyalty cannot be bought. Whatever bargain we make, Daughter of the Sun, must include her freedom.”
― Eloise Jarvis McGraw, Mara, Daughter of the Nile

RISE TOGETHER

ADAM T NA SPEAKER

IF DRINKING DON’T KILL ME

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM

SMALL TRIBUTE FOR IZZY FOREAL BY PETER CARRUTHERS

RISE TOGETHER

ADAM T NA SPEAKER

IF DRINKING DON’T KILL ME

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM

SMALL TRIBUTE FOR IZZY FOREAL BY PETER CARRUTHERS