Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.

St. Jerome

To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

George Santayana

Love, like a chicken salad or restaurant hash, must be taken with blind faith or it loses its flavor.

Helen Rowland

There are no adequate substitutes for father, mother, and children bound together in a loving commitment to nurture and protect. No government, no matter how well-intentioned, can take the place of the family in the scheme of things.

Gerald R. Ford

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation - not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago.

Barack Obama

Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray.

Milan Kundera

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

Thomas Jefferson

What you need is an idea.

William P. Lear

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

Jorge Luis Borges

A bureaucrat is a person who cuts red tape sideways.

J. Mccabe

So, the darkness in life appears immediately when we sit down to do zazen because immediately we'll find out that our best intentions to do zazen well don't come off. Usually we don't do zazen quite as well as we want to. And we also find out a curious thing that even when we are very sincere, unbidden thoughts arise, unbidden feelings. Things come out of nowhere that we had no intention of summoning. And usually we spend some time fighting with these. I certainly did. A lot of time fighting with these. And I think some fighting can be good because we can feel our strength and our sincerity, but in the long run you just feed the demon when you fight it. You give it energy. In the long run what happens is that if we just attend, things settle. In that way, I think, we go into the poison. We darken the darkness.Zazen: a particular kind of meditation, unique to Zenhttp://www.dharmaweb.org/index.php/Poison_and_Joy_John_Tarrant,_Roshi

John Tarrant, Poison and Joy

Confidence is the most important single factor in this game, and no matter how great your natural talent, there is only one way to obtain and sustain it: work.

Jack Nicklaus