Notes — Assorted quotes on world builders:
| Lewis Hyde |
| A disquieting sense of triviality, of worthlessness even, will nag the man or woman who labors in the service of a gift and whose products are not adequately described as commodities. Where we reckon our substance by our acquisitions, the gifts of the gifted man are powerless to make him substantial. |
| Gospel of Thomas |
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. |
| Janais Nin |
We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.
| Pearl S. Buck |
The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create—so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.
| Carl Jung |
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
| John Muir |
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
Henry James
Deep experience is never peaceful.
@nosilverv
In ~ all areas I've looked at like 90% of the work is not the actual work but undoing confusions and mistakes and lies and status games and language games so that you can actually interact with the material. WHY is it like this
| James ? |
For only to the few whose inner senses have been quickened, perchance by some strange suffering in the depths, or by a natural temperament bequeathed from a remote past, comes the knowledge, not too welcome, that this greater world lies ever at their elbow, and that any moment a chance combination of moods and forces may invite them to cross the shifting frontier.
| Algernon Blackwood |
Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind.
| Terence McKenna |
| Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed. |
| Alan Watts |
Like it or not, change is coming. And the greater the resistance, the greater the pain.
| I Ching |
Adapting itself to obstacles and bending around them, wood in the earth grows upward without haste and without rest. Thus too the superior man is devoted in character and never pauses in his progress.
Tao Te Ching
Only when we are sick of our sickness
Shall we cease to be sick.
The Sage is not sick, being sick of sickness;
This is the secret of health.
Shall we cease to be sick.
The Sage is not sick, being sick of sickness;
This is the secret of health.
| James P Carse |
| Only that which can change can continue. |
| Marshall McLuhan |
The present is always invisible because it’s environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.
A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
Carlos Castaneda
The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary man takes everything as a blessing or a curse.
The self-confidence of the warrior is not the self-confidence of the average man. The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness. The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.
Buckminster Fuller
Don’t oppose forces, use them.
Hofstadter’s Law
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.
Herman Hesse
Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men and women treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.
Sam Harris
You can’t take credit for your talents, but it matters that you use them. You can’t really be blamed for your weaknesses, but it matters that you correct them. So pride and shame don’t make a lot of sense in the final analysis. But they weren’t much fun anyway; these are isolating emotions.
Sam Harris
The greater a man’s talents, the greater his power to lead astray.
Aldous Huxley
I want to stay as close on the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.
Charles Eames
Eventually, everything connects.
With thanks for most of these quotes to my favorite designer and personal hero, and founder of cargo.site on which this site is built — Folkert Gorter