Puck's Quote Board, page 77
Boasting 1613 quotes!
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One of the reasons I remember those early Bombay months so well is that, whenever I was alone, I wrote about those new friends and the conversations we shared. And writing was one of the things that saved me: the discipline and abstraction of putting my life into words, every day, helped me to cope with shame and its first cousin, despair.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:48 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Tell us Lin. I would like to know.”
“Well, if you press me, I’d have to say freedom.”
“The freedom to do what?” he asked, putting a little laugh in the last word.
“I don’t know. Maybe just the freedom to say no. If you’ve got that much freedom, you really don’t need any more.”Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:47 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“You’re a good listener. That’s dangerous, because it’s so hard to resist. Being listened to – really listened to – is the second-best thing in the world.”
“What’s the first best thing?”
“Everybody knows that. The best thing in the world is power.”
“Oh, is it?” I asked, laughing. “What about sex?”
“No. Apart from biology, sex is all about power. That’s why it’s such a rush.”
I laughed again.
“And what about love? A lot of people say that love is the best thing in the world, not power.”
“They’re wrong,” she said with terse finality. “Love is the opposite of power. That’s why we fear it so much.”Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:46 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I was numb, in those first years after the escape: shell-shocked by the disasters that warred in my life. My heart moved through deep and silent water. No-one, and nothing, could really hurt me. No-one, and nothing, could make me very happy. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:45 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“The world and I are not on speaking terms,” Karla said to me once in those early months. “The world keeps trying to win me back, she said, bit it doesn’t work. I guess I’m just not the forgiving type.”
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:45 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The past reflects eternally between two mirrors – the bright mirror of words and deeds, and the dark one, full of things we didn’t do or say. I wish now that from the beginning, even then in the first weeks that I knew her, even on that night, the words had come to tell her… to tell her that I liked her.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:43 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discrete shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding, indefatigable, and distant past that had crashed intact, though barriers of time, into its own future. I liked it.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:42 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, that through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you’ve got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:41 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Now we can understand what Jesus meant when he spoke about forgiveness, about love, about heaven. He said, “Let the children come with me because the ones who are like them can enter the kingdom of heaven.” When you are a child before you have knowledge, which means before you eat all of the lies, you live in heaven. When you fall, it is because you are innocent. And when you recover that paradise, you become like a child again, but with a big difference. Now you are no longer innocent; you are wise. This gives you immunity; you cannot fall again.
Speaker: Don Miguel RuizPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:39 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
What is the best way to write your life story? There is only one way, and that way is with love. Love is the material I use to write my story because love comes directly from my integrity, from what I really am. I love the main character of my story, and the main character loves and enjoys every secondary character. I am not afraid to tell you, “I love you.” Your mind may say, “How can you love me when you don’t even know me?” I don’t need to know you. I don’t need to justify my love. I love you because this is my pleasure. Love coming out of me makes me happy, and it’s not important if you reject me because I don’t reject myself. In my story, I live in an ongoing romance, and everything is beautiful for me.
Speaker: Don Miguel RuizPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:37 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
When you are doing your best in your creation, the mind stops. You are alive again. Your emotions are coming out and you don’t even notice how great you feel. The action, just the action, makes you feel great. When you have inaction, your mind has to have action, and that is an open invitation for the voice of knowledge to talk to you. But when you are absorbed in what you are doing, the mind hardly speaks.
Speaker: Don Miguel RuizPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:36 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
You can live with awareness and recover a wonderful power that humans gave up long ago: faith.
Faith is a force that comes from our integrity. It is the expression of what we really are. Faith is the power of our creation because we use faith to create our life story and to transform our life story. Different traditions have called this power by different names. The Toltec call it intent, but I prefer to call it faith.Speaker: Don Miguel RuizPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:35 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
If you follow these two rules – don’t believe yourself, and don’t believe anybody else – all of the lies that come from the voice of knowledge won’t survive your skepticism. Being skeptical is not about being judgmental; it is not about taking the position that you are more intelligent than others. You just don’t believe, and what is true will become obvious. This is very interesting because the truth survives your skepticism even if you don’t believe it. That is the beauty of the truth. The truth doesn’t need anybody to believe it. The truth is still the truth whether or not you believe it. Can we say the same thing about lies? No, lies only exist because we believe them. If we don’t believe in lies, they simply disappear.
Speaker: Don Miguel RuizPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:34 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
When people talk about you now you know they are talking about a secondary character in their story who represents you. They are talking about an image they create for you. You know that it has nothing to do with you. Nut if you agree, if you believe what they say, then their story becomes a part of your story. If you take it personally, it modifies your story. If you don’t take it personally, the opinions of others do not affect you the way they used to, and you have more patience with people.
Speaker: Don Miguel RuizPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:33 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Many times, we don’t see our own creation; we don’t see our own lies. But sometimes in the reflection of somebody else, we can see our own magnificence. By experiencing the love of another person, we can see how great we are. From one artist to another artist, we might see that it’s possible to improve our own art.
Once we have the awareness to see our own story, we discover there is another way of creating the main character. Without awareness, there is nothing we can do, because the story is so powerful that the story writes itself. We create the story, we give our personal power to the story, and then the story is living our lives. But with awareness, we recover the control of our story.
Speaker: Don Miguel RuizPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:32 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Respect comes directly from love; it is one of the greatest expressions of love.
Speaker: Don Miguel RuizPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:31 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I believe that all humans have moments of inspiration when we perceive truth. These moments usually occur when the mind is quiet – when we perceive the force of life through our feelings. Of course, the voices inside our head that we call thinking will invalidate our experience almost right away. These voices will try to justify and deny what we feel. Why? Because when we witness the truth, all of the lies that we believe cannot survive. Humans are afraid of the truth, and when we say that we are afraid, the one who is speaking is the liar. Yes, because the lies that speak through that voice cannot survive the truth, and they don’t want to die.
Speaker: Don Miguel RuizPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:31 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
You know, most people around the world believe that there is a great conflict in the universe, a conflict between good and evil. Well, this is not true. It’s true that there is a conflict, but the conflict only exists in the human mind, not in the universe. It’s not true for the plants or the animals. It’s not true for the stars or the trees, or for the rest of nature. It’s only true for humans. And the conflict in the human mind is not really between good and evil. The real conflict in our mind is between the truth and what is not the truth, between the truth and lies. Good and evil are just the result of that conflict.
Speaker: Don Miguel RuizPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:30 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
From this point, it is easy to understand what is meant by original sin. The original sin is not sex. No, that is another lie. The original sin is to believe the lies that come from the snake in the tree, the fallen angel. The meaning of the word sin is “to go against.” Everything that we say, everything that we do against ourselves is sin. To sin is not about blame or moral condemnation. To sin is to believe in lies, and to use those lies against ourselves. From that first sin, that original lie, all of our other sins are born.
Speaker: Don Miguel RuizPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:29 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Then learn that mortal man must always look to his ending,
and none can be called happy until that day when he carries
His happiness down to the grave in peace.” ChorusSpeaker: SophoclesPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 8:27 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment!