Friday Afternoon Quotes

“But in a secular society, a prophet has no function other than indignation. So it happens that he becomes intoxicated with his own words and claims a legitimacy with no basis, calling down the destruction that he pretends to warn against. You’ll get what you’ve got coming!—that is the death wish that our misanthropes address to us. These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to listen to them. Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy. It is a short distance from lucidity to bitterness, from prediction to anathema.”

--Pascal Bruckner

“Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?”

--Friedrich Nietzsche

“There are no ordinary moments. We have always known this, deep down, for we were young children once, and secretly we still are. We just pretended to be ‘grown ups’, that’s all. Life is still the cosmic adventure it always was.
 
It is not the ‘me’ that awakens. Awakening cannot enter the story, for it is beyond time and space and cannot be some kind of conclusion for a ‘person’. The awakening is from the mirage of ‘me’, with its projects, its plans, its conclusions, its incessant seeking for more, and its never-ending holding up of an image, including the image of myself as some kind of Wizard of Oz, some superhuman, some Christ figure, some hyper-awakened being sent down from heaven to awaken the mortals and the ignorant and the unlucky.

For some, this realization is sudden. For many, it is gradual, over a lifetime. For all, it is timeless, and for all, the destination is the same – Kansas, Home – and the destination is the origin, and it all points to this moment exactly as it is, right now. Stunningly ordinary, yet as vast as the universe, as rich and as full as the Ganges at sunrise, as precious as that look in your child’s eyes, so easily forgotten, so soon remembered.

There’s no place like Home – the present moment. The Emerald City, however colourful and exciting, doesn’t even come close to the intimacy and majesty of a single instant of being alive. Only empty magpie-promises live in that shining city of light and darkness, and the following, following, following, following, following of false prophets living and dying for profit.

There’s no place like Home. Click your heels together three times and say it. Nothing to lose.”

--Jeff Foster