Quietude

"Allow the heart to

empty itself of all turmoil!

Retrieve the utter tranquility

of the mind from which you issued.

Although all forms are dynamic,

and we all grow and transform,

each of us is compelled

to return to our root.

Our root is quietude."

- Lao Tzu

The Sentinel

"Think of such civilizations, far back in time against the fading afterglow of creation, masters of a universe so young that life as yet had come only to a handful of worlds. Theirs would have been a loneliness of gods looking out across infinity and finding none to share their thoughts."

- Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)

The Sentinel

Unapproachable Silence

"My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear — a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence. The "I" in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable."

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

Simplicity

"When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. "

-  Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Balance

"In the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino put it as simply as possible. The mind, he said, tends to go off on its own so that it seems to have no relevance to the physical world. At the same time, the materialistic life can be so absorbing that we get caught in it and forget about spirituality. What we need, he said, is soul, in the middle, holding together mind and body, ideas and life, spirituality and the world."

- Thomas Moore (1940 - )

Care of the Soul

Creating Divisions

"The general tacit assumption in thought is that it’s just telling you the way things are and that it’s not doing anything – that 'you' are inside there, deciding what to do with the info. But you don't decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us. Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally."

- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

Suggested Reality

"You must suggest to me reality; you can never show me reality.

...all thinkers are apt to become dogmatic, and every dogma fails because it does not give you the other side. The same is true of all things, art, religion and everything else. You must find a third, as your standpoint of reason. This is how I came to work in the science of geometry, which is the only abstract truth."

- George Inness (1825 - 1894)