13. A Buddha In Tokyo in th Meiji era there lived two prominent teachers of opposite characteristics. One, Unsho, an instructor in Shingon, kept Buddha's precepts scrupulously. He never drank intoxicants, nor did he eat after eleven o'clock in the mo...
It used to be obvious that the world was designed by some sort of intelligence. What else could account for fire and rain and lightning and earthquakes? Above all, the wonderful abilities of living things seemed to point to a creator who had a specia...
I think of myth and magic as the hieroglyphics of the human psyche. They are a special language that circumvents conscious thought and goes straight to the subconscious. Non-fiction uses the medium of information. It tells us what we need to know. Sc...
I think humans might be like butterflies; people die every day without many other people knowing about them, seeing their colors, hearing their stories... and when humans are broken, they're like broken butterfly wings; suddenly there are so many bea...
...I suspect everyone there can reason along the lines I described...It's just that when it comes to evolution, and especially to the related realization that we are all pretty small bits of the universe, it seems as though Ham and his followers just...
Dear Human: You've got it all wrong. You didn't come here to master unconditional love. This is where you came from and where you'll return. You came here to learn personal love. Universal love. Messy love. Sweaty Love. Crazy love. Broken love. Whole...
Most of us waste this extraordinary thing called life. We have lived forty or sixty years, have gone to the office, engaged ourselves in social activity, escaping in various forms, and at the end of it, we have nothing but an empty, dull, stupid life...
Narrator: How could she ever hate them for what was at bottom merely their weakness? She would probably have done things like those to be fallen her if she had lived in one of these houses. To measure them by her own yardstick as her father put it. W...
Old Lodge Skins: Come out and fight! It is a good day to die! Thank You for making me a Human Being! Thank You for helpin' me to become a warrior! Thank You for my victories, and for my defeats! Thank You for my vision, and the blindness in which I s...
Jack Crabb: Grandfather, I am glad to see you. Old Lodge Skins: Glad to see you too, my son. My heart soars like a hawk. Do you want to eat? I won't eat with you, because I'm gonna' die soon. Jack Crabb: Die, grandfather? Old Lodge Skins: Yes, my son...
Old Lodge Skins: Come out and fight! It is a good day to die! Thank you for making me a Human Being! Thank you for helping me to become a warrior. Thank you for my victories, and for my defeats. Thank you for my vision, and the blindness in which I s...
[Picard asks the Borg Queen to exchange Data for himself] Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Let him go. He's not the one you want. Borg Queen: Are you offering yourself to us? Captain Jean-Luc Picard: Offering myself...? That's it, I remember now! It wasn't e...
General: Now each battalion has a specific code-name and mission. Battalion 5, raise your hands! [all the African American members put up their hands including Chef] General: You will be the all important first defense wave, which we will call "Opera...
Soap Opera Woman: Excuse me. Wiley: Excuse me. Soap Opera Woman: Hey. Could we do that again? I know we haven't met, but I don't want to be an ant. You know? I mean, it's like we go through life with our antennas bouncing off one another, continously...
Virgil: [looking at the picture Lindsey took of the alien craft] That's a great shot, Linds. Catfish De Vries: You drop your dive light? Lindsey Brigman: No, come on you guys, come on. Now that's the small one, that's the small one here. You can kind...
they ask why do i look so sad they wonder if there is something that makes me mad haven't they understood it all by now? i'm neither mad nor sad i'm just a poet in a dark outfit i'm just a melancholic soul in a hypocritical world i'm just an idealist...
Dandies, who – as you know - scorn all emotions as being beneath them, and do not believe, like that simpleton Goethe, that astonishment can ever be a proper feeling for the human mind.
Until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,-Wait and hope.
Human beings are pattern-seeking animals. It's part of our DNA. That's why conspiracy theories and gods are so popular: we always look for the wider, bigger explanations for things.
There could be nothing more fortunate for human affairs than that by the mercy of God they who are endowed with true piety of life if they have the skill for ruling people should also have the power.
It is a grim job, this business of looking out over humanity.
