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Instinct chooses her own children.
No smile would work, no goodbye would pray, no kindness would save, if the truth inside us wasn’t beautiful.
Don’t mistake your usefulness for your value,
We are collections of things that we find and experience and value and keep inside ourselves, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly, and that collection of things is what we finally become.
Love the truth that you find in the hearts of others. Always listen to the voice of love in your own heart.
what we add to what we are, is the only story of us that isn’t told by someone else.
Every black market in the world is the child of tyranny, war or unpopular laws.
You can respect a man’s rights or opinions without knowing the man at all. But you can only respect the man himself when you find something in him that’s worthy of the word.
Family, home: little words that rise like atolls in earthquakes of the heart. Loss, loneliness: little words that flood the valleys of alone.
What dream, what hope, what despair drives us to the things we do, just to desert us when the deed is done? What hollow things are they, motive and reason, born at night to fade so quickly in the sunlight of consequence? What we do in life lives on inside us,
long after ambition and fear lie frosted and opaqued on forgotten shores. What we do in life, more than what we think or say, is what we are.
Fear is a wolf on a chain, only dangerous when you set it free. Sorrow exhausts itself in the net of forgetting. Anger, for all its fury, can be killed by a smile. Only hope goes on forever, because hope doesn’t belong to us: it belongs to our ancestors, the first of our kind, whose brave love for one another gave us most of the good that we are.
We were friends who didn’t try hard enough to make it more.
know how hard it is to find the line between helping someone out, and helping someone in. I know that all suffer and die inside, again and again, from the addiction of one. And I know that sometimes, if love doesn’t harden itself, love doesn’t survive at all.
Faith. Faith is in everything, in every minute of life, even in sleep. Faith in Mother, sister, brother, or friend: faith that others will stop at the red light, faith in the pilot of the plane and the engineers who signed it into the air, faith in the teachers who guard children for hours every day, faith in cops and firemen and your mechanic, and faith that love will still be waiting for you when you return home. But faith, unlike hope, can die. And when faith dies, the two friends that always die with it are constancy and commitment.
‘it’s only lying that saves the world from being permanently miserable.’
Journalists, lawyers and politicians are people whose professions demand that they almost never tell the whole of the truth. If they did, if they were completely honest about every secret thing they know, civilisation would collapse in a month. Day after day, drink after drink, program after program, it is the lie that keeps us going, not the truth.’
We stood in silence for a while, remembering the dead Khan, Khaderbhai, each of us pulling a different cloak of recollections over our shoulders.
all men become their fathers, but only when they’re not looking.’
Loyalty is something you need for things you don’t love enough. When you love enough, loyalty isn’t even a question.
‘Obedience is the assassin of conscience,’
‘It took so long, fourteen billion years, for this part of the universe to bring into being a consciousness, right here, capable of knowing and actually calculating that it took fourteen thousand million years to make the calculation. We don’t have the right to throw those fourteen billion years away. We don’t have the moral right to waste or damage or kill this consciousness. And we don’t have the right to surrender its will, the most precious and beautiful thing in the universe. We have a duty to study, to learn, to question, to be fair and honest and positive citizens. And above all, we
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I prune the conversation tree. It’s all bonsai. It’s all punchlines now. And it’s better that way, in little pieces of the truth. It’s like a code, the truth. When people hear it, the doors unlock.’
‘The Big Questions only have small answers, and the Big Answers can only be found through small questions.
‘It is the duty of every human being to help others toward rectification, whenever the discourse between them is private, and of a spiritual nature.
‘Because we have a destiny, which is undeniable, our journey is a moral journey. Understanding what is Good, and what is Evil, and the differences between them, is a required step for us to assume our role as guardians of our own destiny. We are a young species, and assuming our destiny is a big step. We only became self-aware yesterday.’
Regret is a ghost of love. Regret is a nicer self that we send into the past from time to time, even though we know it’s too late to change what we said, or did. We do it because it’s human: a thing of our kind. We do it because we care, drawn by threads of shame that only fray and wither in the sea of regret.
regret, even more than love, teaches us that harm creates harm, and compassion creates compassion. And having done its work, regret fades to the nothing that all things become.
‘Knowledge isn’t knowledge, until the truth of it is self-evident in the sharing.
‘Space, time, matter, gravitation, classical physics, particle physics, tendency field, positive characteristics, all imparted in the Birth-Bang.’
If it happens that a fully self-aware consciousness arises, then the connection to the tendency field
happens.’ ‘Doesn’t entropy run counter to complexity?’ ‘No. Entropy runs counter to order. And anyway, infinite entropy only applies in a closed system. And with black holes in our universe, leading who knows where, this isn’t a closed system.’
‘If you get in tune with the tendency field, through expanding and exploring the set of positive characteristics within yourself, the tendency field responds with constant energy, and affirmations. If you work against the tendency field, by being negative, unfair, unloving, and unconscious of the truth, you weaken your connection to the tendency field, and you experience existential dread, no matter how rich or famous or powerful you are.’
‘Nothing is a part of the human condition, but our common humanity.
always connected to the people and the purity of their faith, rather than the religious code they followed. I often had everything in common with them, in fact, but their God.
the Divine in the language of science, and spoke of science in the language of faith.
‘Why do we flock to musicians and painters?’ ‘It’s sexy,’ I said. ‘Painters make them take their clothes off, and musicians make them come.’
The elephant in the room is that we can shape behaviour more fluently than we can understand it. When you know how to make anyone do anything, it makes you start to wonder what we really are.’
If the destination is the journey, I never arrived.
‘You marry them,’ Blue Hijab said, ‘hoping they’ll change, and grow. And they marry us, hoping that we won’t.’
Men are wishes wrapped in secrets, and women are secrets wrapped in wishes.’
Time was the lord of all living things, for billions of years, until Will arose to greet him.’
‘The purpose of life is to express the set of positive characteristics to the most sophisticated degree that you can, by connecting with pure intention to others, and our planet, and to the Divine Source of all things.’
‘When will we demand peace, as passionately as we demand freedom?’
‘Power influences or directs people or processes,’ Idriss said. ‘Power is a measure of control, and is always connected to authority. Power is fear, submitting to greed. There is no fear and there is no greed in love, just as there is no authority or control, which is why it is beyond illusions of power.’
The truth is just inhibition, after three drinks.’
The word family is derived from the word famulus, meaning a servant, and in its early usage, familia, it literally meant the servants of a household. In its essence, the longing for family, and the ravenousness that the loss of family creates in us, isn’t just for belonging: it’s for the grace that abides in serving those we love.
Trust is the soul’s drug of choice.
Truth is the freedom of the soul.
