When your cup is empty, you do not mourn what is gone. Because if you do, you will miss the opportunity to fill it again.
I can remain on shore, paralyzed with fear, or I can raise my sails and dip and soar in the breeze.
If every man and woman were to take the meaning of their life and pursue it passionately, they would alter the social landscape overnight. In fact, that's how lasting revolutions are made- not by the raised arm of the masses, not by the military seizure of power, not by the political coup d'etat, but by individuals asserting who they are one at a time.
For the truth is that I already know as much about my fate as I need to know. The day will come when I will die. So the only matter of consequence before me is what I will do with my allotted time. I can remain on shore, paralyzed with fear, or I can raise my sails and dip and soar in the breeze.
In due course we arrive, if wit can be said that we ever fully arrive. The truth is there are destinations beyond destinations and do the confirmed sailor goes on tacking forever.
If I wanted to be free, truly free, I had to choose. There were many points on the compass rose; I had to locate the few that were meant for me. Not any destination picked at random; I had to head for those that summoned me with a passion, for they were the ones that gave meaning to my life. I had to ignore the warnings of those who would tell me why I couldn't do what I wanted to do.
I once met a man who said he had visited every exotic place from the Grand Canyon to the Great Wall, but when I questioned him closely I discovered he hadn't seen the songbirds in his own backyard.
The trouble with the opera is there's always to much singing.
Any one who has stood upon a lofty summit and gazed over an inchoate tangle of deep canyons and cragged mountains, of sunlit lakelets and black expanses of forest, has become aware of a certain giddy sensation that there are no distances, no measures, simply unrelated matter rising and falling without any analogy to the banal geometry of breadth, thickness, and height.
The second time I took acid, I watched myself in the mirror for nine hours. What I realized, when I stared, was that my face looked exactly the same when I cried as when I laughed. After awhile I couldn't tell which I was doing. Relief was just pain inside out.
If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships - the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace.