Meditation Calendar M

Fear is not a lasting teacher of duty.

Cicero, BCE 106-43

There must always be a struggle between a father and son while one aims at power and the other at independence.

Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784

Genius is the power of lighting one's own fire.

John Foster, 1770-1843

It is not goodness to be better than the very worst.

Seneca, BCE ?1-65 CE

Meditation is the soul's perspective glass.

Owen Feltham, 1602-1668

Life is a dream walking:
Death is a going home.

Chinese Proverb

And on her lover's arm she leant,
And round her waist she felt it fold,
And far across the hills they went
In that new world which is the old.

Alfred (Lord) Tennyson, 1809-1892

In extreme danger, fear feels no pity.

Julius Caesar, BCE 3-65 CE

The future destiny of the child is always the work of the mother.

Napoleon I, 1769-1821

Genius is initiative on fire.

(George) Holbrook Jackson, 1874-1948

Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing.

Charles Caleb Colton, 1780? - 1832

Meditation is the tongue of the soul and the language of the spirit.

Bishop Jeremy Taylor, 1613-1667.

Involvement in a form is the beginning of the death of life. It is a straitening and a limiting; a binding and a constricting. Form checks life, thwarts it, and yet enables it to organise. Seen from the point of view of free-moving force, incarceration in a form is extinction. Form disciplines force with a merciless severity.

Kabbalah, c. ?1200 BCE

I love thee, I love but thee,
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old,
And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!

(James) Bayard Taylor, 1825-1878

Fear is proof of a degenerate mind.

Virgil, BCE 70-19

Men are what their mothers made them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

Genius always gives its best at first; prudence, at last.

Johann Kaspar Lavater, 1741-1801

I hate the giving of the hand unless the whole man accompanies it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal Awareness or Pure Consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.

Swami Sivananda, 1887-1963

Remember the men of old passed away, and those of days to come will also pass away: a mortal ripens like corn and like corn is born again.

Upanishads, c. BCE 800

And my heart springs up anew,
Bright and confident and true,
And the old loves come to meet me
In the dawning and the dew.

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850-1894

The mind that is anxious about the future is miserable.

Seneca, BCE ?1-65 CE

The family you come from isn't as important as the family you're going to have.

Ring Lardner, 1885-1933

Genius does what it must, talent does what it can.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1st Baron), 1803-1873

There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it hardly becomes any of us
To speak ill of the rest of us.

Edward Hoch, 1849-1925

Meditation consists in conducting consciousness beyond the point where it is the consciousness of a finite body or a finite mind, transferring the focus from level to level without losing its continuity or form.

Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, b. 1916

Few cross the river of time and are able to reach non-being. Most of them run up and down only on this side of the river. But those who when they know the law follow the path of the law, they shall reach the other shore and go beyond the realm of death.

The Dhammapada, c. BCE 300

The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies
When love is done.

F W Bourdillon, 1852-1921

There is no passion so contagious as that of fear.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, 1533-1592

When your eyes are fixed in the last stare of unconsciousness,
And your throat coughs the last gasping breath —
As one dragged in the dark to a great precipice —
What assistance are a wife and child?

Nagarjuna, c. 150 CE.

Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.

Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832