The Great Sage says…What? Post a quote or passage

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Thanks PLA!! !

Probably a bad translation, not mine, but:

"Einsiedler" means "loner", but in German it does not have the negative associations this has in English culture. Literally "One-settler", or 'one who lives alone'.

The proverb is similar to "Still waters run deep". This translates as:

Like a deep well is the Einsiedler. Easy it is to throw a stone into it; however, if it should sink to the bottom, tell me, who will be the one able to retrieve it?"

The Christian world worships the Crucifix, i.e., the image expressing the paradox of almighty God reduced to a state of extreme powerlessness…. The only Son of the eternal Father nailed to the cross for our sake ---- this is what is divinely impressed upon all open souls, including the robber crucified to the right. This impression is unforgettable and inexpressible. It is the immediate breath of God which has inspired and still inspires thousands of martyrs, confessors of the faith, virgins and recluses. But it is not so that every human being finding himself facing the Crucifix may be thus divinely moved. There are those who react in the opposite way. It was so at the time of Calvary; it is so today.

"And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying:… If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross." (Matt.27:39 – 40)

The chief sacrificers, with the scribes and elders, also mocked him, saying;

"He saved others; he cannot save himself! If he is the king of Israel, let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he loves him!" (Matt. 27:42-43)

This is the other reaction. Nowadays we encounter exactly the same…. It is the dogma or philosophical principle which states that truth and power are identical; that which is powerful is true and that which is powerless is false. According to this dogma or philosophical principle (which has become that of modern technological science) power is the absolute criterium and supreme ideal of truth. Only that which is powerful is of the Divine.

Now there are open and secret worshippers of the idol of power (for it is an idol, the source of all idolatry) ---- also in Christian factions or in religious and spiritual circles in general….

It is they who teach that God has created souls predestined to eternal damnation and others predestined to salvation; it is they who make God responsible for the entire history of the human race, including all its atrocities. God, they say, “chastises” his disobedient children by means of wars, revolutions, tyrannies and other similar things. How could it be otherwise? God is almighty, therefore all that happens is only able to happen through is action or with his consent.

The idol of power has such a hold on some human minds that they prefer a God who is a mixture of good and evil, provided that he is powerful, to a God of love who governs only by the intrinsic authority of the Divine ---- by truth, beauty, and goodness ---- i.e., they prefer a God who is actually almighty to the crucified God…..


Is mankind therefore solely responsible for its history? Without a doubt – because it is not God who has willed it to be as such. God is crucified in it.

One understands this when one takes account of the significance of the fact of human freedom…. Freedom is nothing other than the real and complete existence of a being created by God. To be free and to exist are synonymous from a moral and spiritual point of view…. Freedom is the spiritual existence of beings.


Anonymous (20th century)
Christian Hermeticist

A padshah was in the same boat with a Persian slave who had never before been to sea and experienced the inconvenience of a vessel. He began to cry and to tremble to such a degree that he could not be pacified by kindness, so that at last the king became displeased as the matter could not be remedied. In the boat there happened to be a philosopher, who said: "With thy permission I shall quiet him." The padshah replied: "It will be a great favour." The philosopher oredered the slave to be thrown into the water so that he swallowed some of it, whereon he was caught and pulled by his hair to the boat, to the stern of which he clung with both his hands. Then he sat down in a corner and became quiet.

This appeared strange to the king who knew not what wisdom there was in the proceeding and asked for it. The philosopher replied: "Before he had tasted the calamity of being drowned, he knew not the safety of the boat; thus also a man does not appreciate the value of immunity of a misfortune until it has befallen him."

The Gulistan of Sa'di, Sheikh Muslih-Uddin Sa'di Shirazi
(c.1193-1291) (Sufi writings)

I'm unsure of the sources for some of these:

If you jump in a river; you will get wet.
-- ?

The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese!
-- ?

Truth is stranger than fiction
-- ?

A drop raises the ocean.
--Dinotopia?

Cogito ergo sum.
--Descartes

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; there is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.
--Henry David Thoreau

You pile up enough tomorrows and you'll collect nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays.
--The Music Man

If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?
--Albert Einstein

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
--Robert Frost

wickedness never was happiness
--Alma the Younger

All things by immortal power,
Near or far,
Hiddenly
To each other linked are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling a star.
--Francis Thompson

"When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells the time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence when it embraces everything, including these artifacts themselves and their artificers? Our friend Posidonius as you know has recently made a globe which in its revolution shows the movements of the sun and stars and planets, by day and by night, just as they appear in the sky. Now if someone were to take this globe and show it to the people of Britain or Scythia would a single one of those barbarians fail to see that it was the product of a conscious intelligence?"

Cicero

"Is it not a wonder that anyone can bring himself to believe that a number of solid and separate particles by their chance collisions and moved by their own weight could bring into being so marvelous and beautiful a world? If anyone thinks that this is possible, I do not see why he should not think that if an infinite number of examples of the twenty-one letters of the alphabet, made of gold or what you will, were shaken together and poured on the ground it would be possible for these to spell out, say, the whole text of the Annals of Ennius. In fact I doubt whether chance would permit them to spell out a single verse!"

Cicero

"If there is anything in nature which the human mind, which human intelligence, energy and power could not create, then the creator of such things must be a being superior to man. But the heavenly bodies in their eternal orbits could not be created by man. They must therefore be created by a being greater than man... Therefore there must be something greater than man. And that something must be God."

Chrysippus

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.
When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, I am in the heart of God."
And think not you can direct the course of love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

- Kahlil Gibran, "The Prophet" - 'Love'



Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.
If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.
For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

- Kahlil Gibran, "The Prophet" - 'Reason and Passion'


For what is it die, but to stand naked in the wind and melt into the sun?
...
Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

- Kahlil Gibran, "The Prophet" - 'Death'



You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief,
But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.
And how shall you rise beyond your days and nights unless you break the chains which you at the dawn of your understanding have fastened around your noon hour?
In truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of these chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle the eyes.
And what is it but fragments of your own self you would discard that you may become free?

Kahlil Gibran - "The Prophet" - 'Freedom'

"Homines libenter id quod volunt credunt."

Caesar, De Bello Gallico, III, 18

In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man's becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but is something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile...We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language...and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.

~ Theodore Roosevelt 1907

That they do.




It might also be noteworthy that Nietzsche mentioned this in the context of how it is unwise to wrong a loner.

If there is joy in meditation upon the
sun and moon,
the planets and fixed stars are the magic
creation of the sun and moon;
make thyself like unto the sun and
moon themselves.

If there is joy in meditation upon the
mountain,
the fruit-trees are the magic creation of
the mountain;
make thy self like the mountain itself.

If there is joy in meditation upon thine
own mind,
distinctive thought is the magic
creation of the mind;
make thyself like unto the mind itself.

- The Message of Milarepa
(1040-1123)


“One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”

- The Fox
The Little Prince

Something Like the Sun

The eye must be something like the sun,
Otherwise no sunlight could be seen;
God’s own power must be inside us,
How else could Godly things delight us?

- Goethe

Talmud: always striving to see many sides of an issue:

"Love work; hate positions of domination; do not make yourself known to the authorities" (Talmud, Tractate Avot, 1:10)

"Be wary of the authorities! They do not befirend anyone unless it serves their own needs. They appear as freind when it is to their advantage but do not stand by a person in his hour of need" (Talmud, Tractate Avot, 2:2

"Pray for the welfare of the Government, for if people did not fear it they would swallow each other alive" (Talmud, Tractate Avot, 3:2)

"A person who shuns the office of judge, rids himself of enmity, theft, and perjury; but he who treats the judicial process lightly is a fool, wicked and arrogant" (Talmud, Tractate Avot, 4:9)



"Power is a dangerous servant and a terrible master" --> George Washington


"No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown" --> William Penn (I'm not Christian, but the crucifixion is a good metaphor for any protracted ordeal of suffering for a larger purpose)


"Western civilization cut its throat in World War I and has been too busy bleeding to death since then to notice" --> Robert Heinlein


"How weary I am of those who loathe themselves with casual brutality" --> Stefan Key


"Do not underestimate the power of a person to either find a new religion or ideology or to reinterpret the one they were raised with in order to do what they intended to do all along" --> me


"Do no one insufficient injury" --> Niccolo Machiavelli from The Prince (which, given how difficult it is to do sufficient injury argues for the more vernacular form of this lesson, by Laurel K Hamilton "Kill them or leave them the f*ck alone".)

We're all f***ed. It helps to remember that sometimes.

George Carlin

Since once I sat upon a promotory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea maid's music.

A Midsummer Nights Dream,
William Shakespear (1564-1616)

everybody lies.

House, or Mr. Garibaldi?

"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." - Albert Einstein

isn't that from Stargate when Daniel ascends? or did they steal that from someone?