No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.
Category Archives: THINK THINK THINK
What a man thinks, that he is; this is the old secret. | THE OLD PROVERBIAL RECOVERY
“I would enter the desert alone, to leave in the sand endless footprints only to be obliterated by the wind, to walk the same path each day expecting the same path tomorrow, and perhaps to cease wondering at the bloom and wither of lilies only to linger for death. But no, even in the desert, I would seek a new sanctuary, to contemplate a grain of sand in a sea of dryness…”― Leonard Seet, Meditation on Space-Time
Source: What a man thinks, that he is; this is the old secret. | THE OLD PROVERBIAL RECOVERY
A little nonsense now and then’ is relished by the wisest men.—HUDIBRAS. 1909
When people are too open-minded it can lead them into being unable to discriminate between sense and nonsense.
Time is wrinkling its nose & winking its eye.
To follow foolish precedents and to wink with both our eyes, is easier than to think.
“Life: sometimes the man on the saddle, sometimes the saddle on the man.” ― Idries Shah, Caravan of Dreams
Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.
Khalil Gibran
There’s no ego when you’re a ukulele player. – Jake Shimabukuro
“I think, therefore I strum.” – Clive Harvey, ukulele player and teacher
Arab. — Man thinks, God guides.
Kurd. — Think of the wolf, but keep a rod in readiness for him.
The thought has good wings, and the quill a good tongue.
“You’re only a man! You’ve not our gifts! I can tell you! Why, a woman can think of a hundred different things at once, all them contradictory!”
― Georgette Heyer, Powder And Patch
Do not stand in a place of danger trusting in miracles. Arabian Proverb
The Market-Place
My mind is like a clamorous market-place.
All day in wind, rain, sun, its babel wells;
Voice answering to voice in tumult swells.
Chaffering and laughing, pushing for a place,
My thoughts haste on, gay, strange, poor, simple, base;
This one buys dust, and that a bauble sells:
But none to any scrutiny hints or tells
The haunting secrets hidden in each sad face.
The clamour quietens when the dark draws near;
Strange looms the earth in twilight of the West,
Lonely with one sweet star serene and clear,
Dwelling, when all this place is hushed to rest,
On vacant stall, gold, refuse, worst and best,
Abandoned utterly in haste and fear.
The temple of our purest thoughts is silence. Sarah J. Hale
How much of grief the heart must prove, That yields a sanctuary to love.
“Be brave, little rabbit. Take a chance.” ― Cherise Sinclair, Breaking Free
“One minute I’m just another rabbit and happy about it, next minute whazaam, I’m thinking. That’s a major drawback if you’re looking for happiness as a rabbit, let me tell you. You want grass and sex, not thoughts like ‘What’s it all about, when you get right down to it?'”
-
(Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures)
“As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts.” ― David Sedaris, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls
“Don’t you find it odd,” she continued, “that when you’re a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you’re older, somehow they act offended if you even try.”
― Ethan Hawke, The Hottest State
“It’s difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato.” Lewis Grizzard
“He’d noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination – but at the end of the day they’d settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
ˆFOTO – HOMEGROWN TOMATOES AT THE BEACHSHACK
The man with the boots does not mind where he places his foot. Irish
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play
Change your thoughts and you change your world. Norman Vincent Peale
Philosophy is the art of drawing conclusions from definitions that have been chosen so that one can draw the conclusions one would like to get. It immediately follows that philosophy is silly.
Thomas Kettenring’s .sig file.
If I supply you with a thought, you may remember it and you may not. But if I can make you think a thought for yourself, I have indeed added to your stature.
– Elbert Hubbard
0, lizard, if you ent’er the water you will become a crocodile.
As if one said to a man, " Yes, go on, you can do it," knowing well that he cannot. To egg him on.
The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 – 1954), Saturday 25 March 1933
Good intentions.
The lizard, when it feels cold at night, says to itself " to-morrow I will find a smouldering tree to sleep in so that I shall be warm." Next day when it basks in the sun it forgets and does not do it ; the consequence is that it feels cold again next night.
http://archive.org/stream/hausaproverbs00merrrich/hausaproverbs00merrrich_djvu.txt
The chains of addiction are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
The Wilderness
for Peter Barden
Penury in Sydney had grown stale
And, at twenty-two, my childhood was in danger
So I preceded you, in all but spirit,
To the far-back country
Where the tar roads end.
In the silent lands
Time broadens into space.
Approaching Port Augusta, going on,
Iron-brown and limitless, the plains
Were before me all day. Burnt mountains fell behind
In the glittering sky.
At dawn, the sun would roll up from his lair
In the kiln-dry lake country, fire his heat straight through
The blind grey scrub, awaken me beside wheeltracks
And someone’s car, and I would travel on.
At noon, far out in a mirage, I would brew
Tea with strangers, yarn about jobs in the North
And, chewing quietly, watch maybe an upstart
Dust-devil forming miles off, going high
To totter, darken
And, quite suddenly, vanish
Leaving a formless, thinning stain in the heavens.
Where the spirits of sea-cliffs
Hovered on the plain
I would remember routines we had invented
For putting spine into shapeless days: the time
We passed at a crouching trot down Wynyard Concourse
Tell each other in loud mock-Arunta and gestures
What game we were tracking down what haunted gorge . . .
Frivolous games
But they sustained me like water,
They, and the is-ful ah!-nesses of things.
http://www.lesmurray.org/uncollected_twc.htm#rttw
Euroa Advertiser (Vic. : 1884 – 1920), Friday 20 February 1885,
The chains of addiction are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. SWAHILI.
http://swahiliproverbs.afrst.illinois.edu/love.html
If one loves, one loves the whole person as he or she is, and not as one might wish them to be. ~ Lev Tolstoi, Russia
“Keep your head up, forge forward fee-sabeel-illah, keep praying, learning, thinking, following your dreams, and loving the people in your life. It’s all worth it, it all matters and makes a difference. Every single thing you do is meaningful, even when you don’t see it. You are my brothers, my sisters, my heroes.” –
Wael Abdelgawad
Queensland Times (Ipswich) (Qld. : 1909 – 1954), Monday 5 August 1946,
MY SISTER’S STAYING. THINGS ARE NOTMy sister’s staying. Things are not
where I’m used to finding them. This time
I tell myself it doesn’t matter. This time
I’m the one who has been cut. The poem
I wrote for her has come back to bite me.
So she is here to help. She’s already done
the garden, finishing off the jobs her sister started.
The peace lily my mother gave me when my father died
has been re-potted and is doing well beneath the camellia.
Today we walked to Market Town for a little bit of retail
therapy: DVDs and shoes. We also saw a movie called
Brokeback Mountain, which, according to the publicists,
is about gay cowboys. In fact it’s more about
how love isn’t always able to be
what you want.
We also watch her favourite TV shows, most of which
seem to be about the supernatural. And every now and then
she says something that lets me know how she coped
with her cancer. Keeping company, we are aware
of how living and dying reach out to each other, learning to be
at ease in my new leather lounge. It’s good: we’re still here
for the moment and that will have to be enough.
© 2005, Noel Rowe
From: Touching the Hem
Publisher: Vagabond Press, Sydney, 2005
From: Touching the Hem
Publisher: Vagabond Press, Sydney, 2005
A boy’s will is the wind’s will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ‘My LostYouth’, in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, vol.6, Aug. Collected in The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems, 1858. In his diary Longfellow notes that these lines are from an ‘old Lapland song’.
http://quotes.yourdictionary.com/wind
But an old age serene and bright, and lovely as a Lapland night,
shall lead thee to thy grave.
– William Wordsworth
Linnaeus in Lapland
BY LORINE NIEDECKER
Nothing worth noting
except an Andromeda
with quadrangular shoots—
the boots
of the people
wet inside: they must swim
to church thru the floods
or be taxed—the blossoms
from the bosoms
of the leaves
Fog-thick morning—
I see only
where I now walk. I carry
my clarity
with me.
Hear
where her snow-grave is
the You
ah you
of mourning doves
The Darling Downs Gazette and General Advertiser (Toowoomba, Qld. : 1858 – 1880), Monday 3 May 1880
I choose to listen to the river for a while, thinking river thoughts, before joining the night and the stars. — (Edward Abbey)
Taoist Mondo
One day Chuang-tzu and a friend were walking along a riverbank. “How delightfully the fishes are enjoying themselves in the water!” Chuang-tzu exclaimed.
“You are not a fish,” his friend said. “How do you know whether or not the fishes are enjoying themselves?”
“You are not me,” Chuang-tzu said. “How do you know that I do not know that the fishes are enjoying themselves?”
My dear girl, you don’t consent to an abduction! You consent to an elopement, and I knew you wouldn’t do that.” ― Georgette Heyer, Black Sheep
You, that are going to be married, think things can never be done too fast: but we that are old, and know what we are about, must elope methodically, madam.
Oliver Goldsmith
“There were rules among friends, commandments, really, and the most important one was Thou Shalt Not Lust After Thy Friend’s Sister.”
Julia Quinn, The Duke and I
SHIT POEM
by JAS H. DUKE
I’m in the shit business
I work for the sewerage department
I analyse experiments
I draw graphs and flow charts
and conclusions
today I was sitting at my desk
trying to explain
the dissolved air flotation process
where streams of little bubbles are released
into a tank full of sewerage
to float the suspended solids up to the surface
to be skimmed off
but what I was really thinking about
was lunchtime
Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night. William Blake
Queenie Chan
“There were no childish flights of fancy here – no silly games of ‘pretend’, and certainly no bedtime stories. ‘Not under our roof’, my grandmother would say, rolling her eyes. She often rolls her eyes in that fashion, especially when talking about our neighbours, the Darlings. She did this even in front of Mrs Darling, when she once came over to invite me to an afternoon play session with her three children.”
Brothers,I am glad to see so many of you nd see you playing the old games. I shall not keep you long,but you have asked for my advice.Our way of life is gone.Your children must travel the white man’s roads. Geronimo
“Keep your head up, forge forward fee-sabeel-illah, keep praying, learning, thinking, following your dreams, and loving the people in your life. It’s all worth it, it all matters and makes a difference. Every single thing you do is meaningful, even when you don’t see it. You are my brothers, my sisters, my heroes.”
– Wael Abdelgawad
One love, one heart, one destiny.”
― Bob Marley
Lying Down In My Hotel Room,
Thinking About The Day
I have spent too long
telling the world the world is the world
and poetry is made of language.
Today on the Bedford platform, I began
the great poem: weeping openly on the public
telephone—the way some were staring
as they swirled past, the way some
weren’t—yes: it was truth
at last.
—Jan Zwicky
http://www.australianpoetry.org/2013/10/09/the-draw-of-the-heart-to-the-flame/
THE OLD PROVERBIAL RECOVERY 