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We are shaped by pressures whether we resist them or not.
Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck. —DARWI ODRADE
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.
“Show me a completely smooth operation and I’ll show you someone who’s covering mistakes. Real boats rock.”
Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect all who seek it.
“‘I am not a river, I am a net.’
Some precious stones could be identified by their impurities. Experts mapped impurities within the stones. A secret fingerprint. People were like that. You often knew them by their defects. The glittering surface told you too little. Good identification required you to look deep inside and see the impurities. There was the gem quality of a total being. What would Van Gogh have been without impurities?
Souvenirs of memory must be only that. Things to be taken up and fondled occasionally for evocation of past joys. No joy can be permanent. All is transient. “This, too, shall pass away” applies to all of our living universe.
Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals create patterned behavior. All patterned behavior tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum.
No sweeteners will cloak some forms of bitterness. If it tastes bitter, spit it out. That’s what our earliest ancestors did.
