“We can rise. We can achieve so much at the end of the day if we get it right.”
Source: Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness
“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
Source: Across the Frontiers
Sparks
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIV - Higgledy-Piggledy
Context: Everything matters more than we think it does, and, at the same time, nothing matters so much as we think it does. The merest spark may set all Europe in a blaze, but though all Europe be set in a blaze twenty times over, the world will wag itself right again.
“I dont think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.”
Source: Memoirs of a Geisha
PENN Address (2004)
Context: The scale of the suffering and the scope of the commitment they often numb us into a kind of indifference. Wishing for the end to AIDS and extreme poverty in Africa is like wishing that gravity didn't make things so damn heavy. We can wish it, but what the hell can we do about it?
Well, more than we think. We can't fix every problem — corruption, natural calamities are part of the picture here — but the ones we can we must. The debt burden, as I say, unfair trade, as I say, sharing our knowledge, the intellectual copyright for lifesaving drugs in a crisis, we can do that. And because we can, we must. Because we can, we must. Amen.
“We like to think of life as a constant … Yet it can be ended in a heartbeat.”
Source: Drenai series, The Swords of Night and Day, Ch. 14
