Proverbial Thoughts

I sit in the dark, with growling gut;
and  pay no mind to food or light,
as long as I'm inclined to write.

A fool claims the first and only thing he sees;
while a sage contemplates possibilities.

Nothing is heavier than what you have in hand.

I am more at odds with myself than with anybody else.

My teacher is love, and all that's made of love is bread for my spirit, life for my soul.

A pure soul is a polished flute, in the fingers of the muse.

When the heart is as clean as a whistle, the purest of muses will play.

Desire nothing of which life can deprive you. Not even life itself.

I am responsible for everything I say, and much of what you hear.

Said the Heart to the Head:
"It is only a matter of time, before you do me in.
You have your razor tongue, and I my paper skin."

Attention is blood well-supplied in the brain. Concentration, when it swells, upright and aroused, and carries all thoughts to the Shaivite shrine. Reflections, lifted on a river of desire, ford the furrows of the winding brain, towards a spiritual erection at the site of the crown.

Lord, strike all cruelty from out my breast! Give to me a good heart, or make evil every good I've got. For cruelty feeds on, and ends by consuming, the heart; as a worm works its way through a fleshy fruit. Consider how quickly a rotten organ, centrally place.d, spoils every organ in the body of virtues. Without love, the sacred wand of brilliance becomes a worldly scepter in a tyrant's hand. Humility is deformed to form servility. Industriousness used for personal gain. The example of the good more than pales before the evil by which it is employed, and only makes of the virtue a more cunning, facile, and sophisticated vice.

Suffering and strength are the same in everyone, and nothing is more beautiful. Knowing a person, -- her private, festering wounds, neglected because no one remembered how to heal them, and the most generous and expansive movements of her heart, -- we cannot help loving her. The closer we come to seeing her, the less we regard whatever separates us from her. We come to see how much we share, and that the things we share are, in fact, the very things which make us human, and which remain the most profound and affecting aspects of our being. Our fear, our aspiration, our courage, our vulnerability: It matters so little which particular conditions arouse these feelings, or what manner of expression they take. Granted, those are more or less unique for each of us, but the feelings themselves are what make us beautiful and human. We should always relate to the feelings of others, even when we are indifferent to, or differently related to, whatever evoked the feelings in them, and whatever behaviors the feelings provoked. The multitude of external stimuli and, finally, the outer effects, are not so important as the internal emotional responses which mediate between them, and which we all share, to greater and lesser degrees.

There is within you a saint, a mature spirit, who may look with circumspection on the writings of the saints, and have mercy on their sins.

I'm weightless, lost, hanging onto this planet by a fuzzy yarn;
a crazy story with threads of guilt, guile, grace, and grief.

Gentle honesty. Gentlemanly. A head more well-formed than well-fed.

I've never seen a fresh cadaver on the road.