Quotations : TO BE PRESENT MINDFULNESS THOUGHT SENSES FEAR MEDITATION ALBERT EINSTEIN VARIOUS

TO BE PRESENT

“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing.  
People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction
between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
A. Einstein

“We often lose the vividness of the present moment by ‘being somewhere else.’
  When we are able to be in the present moment, we become more awake
in our lives, more aware, with more choices open to us.”
Segal, Williams & Teasdale

MINDFULNESS

“The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”
Albert Einstein

“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit
who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”
Albert Einstein

“All humanity's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Blaise Pascal

“Not through actions, not through words do we become free
from mental contaminations,but seeing and acknowledging them over and over.”
Anguttara Nikaya, 557-477 B.C.

“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
The Talmud

“Only what you have experienced yourself can be called knowledge. Everything is information.”
Albert Einstein

THOUGHT

“Always do what you are afraid to do! ”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
A. Einstein

“The only real valuable thing is intuition.”
A. Einstein

“I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details.”
A. Einstein

“I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.”
A. Einstein

“The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
A. Einstein

“The true value of a human being is determined primarily
by the measure and sense in which he has attained
liberation from the self.
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking
if humanity is to survive. ”
Albert Einstein

“There are two ways to slide easily through life:
To believe everything or to doubt everything.
Both ways save us from thinking.”
Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950)

“To believe with certainty we must begin with doubting.”
Stanislaw Leszczynski (1677-1766)

SENSES

“We live on the leash of our senses.”
Diane Ackerman
“There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the
radar-net of our senses.”
Diane Ackerman
“We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many
strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.”
Denis Diderot
“Our ideas are the offspring of our senses;
we are not more able to create the form of a
being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know,
than we are able to create a new sense.
He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form
must have composed it from actual existence.”
Henry Fuseli
“Taste is only to be educated by contemplation,
not of the tolerably good but of the truly excellent.
I therefore show you only the best works;
and when you are grounded in these,
you will have a standard for the rest, which you will know how to value, without overrating them.”
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
“Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived.”
Helen Keller
“Half of us are blind, few of us feel, and we are all deaf.”
- Osler, Sir William
“Each day I live in a glass room unless I break it with the thrusting of my senses and pass through the splintered walls to the great landscape.”
- Peake, Mervyn
“I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.”
- Socrates
“I never know whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses.”
- Thackeray, William M.
“The five senses are horse sense, innocence, common sense, concupiscence, and nonsense.”
Unknown
“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
Oscar Wilde

FEAR

“Always do what you are afraid to do! ”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Move, but don´t move the way fear moves you.”
Rumi

“The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears,
for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead.”
A. Einstein

MEDITATION

VARIOUS

“At the still point of the turning world… there the dance is”
T.S. Eliot

“Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
T.S. Eliot

ALBERT EINSTEIN

“Imagination is more important than knowledge."

“Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."

"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income”

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."

"I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice."

"God is subtle but he is not malicious."

"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."

"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."

"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."

"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."

"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."

"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."

"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."

"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."

"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."

"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."

"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."

"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."

"Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity." 

"If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut."

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

"In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep."

"Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves."

"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"

"No, this trick won't work...How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?"

"Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever." 

"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...
the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.
If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities.
The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit
to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death."

"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

"One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year."

"...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought."

"He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."

"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."