By the Indian poet Dharmakīrti:
"You don't have to control your thoughts. You just have to stop letting them control you." ~Dan Millman
(Clicking imbiggens)
The painting above, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, inspired the poem below, Musée des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully
along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails." ~ William Arthur Ward
"If I were to begin life again, I should want it as it was. I would only open my eyes a little more." ~Jules Renard
"Forget about likes and dislikes. They are of no consequence. Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness." ~George Bernard Shaw
“Sometimes, not doing anything is the best thing we can do. Non-action is already something. There are people who do not seem to do very much, but their presence is crucial for the well-being of the world. There may be someone in our own family who does not make a lot of money, and we could say they are not very active, but if that person wasn’t there, the family would be much less happy and stable because that person is contributing the quality of their being, their non-action.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh
Excerpted from a book review by Tyler Stovall:
In her ambitious and impressive new book, Freedom: An Unruly History, the political historian Annelien de Dijn approaches this massive subject from the standpoint of two conflicting interpretations of freedom and their interactions over 2,500 years of Western history. She starts her study by noting that most people think of freedom as a matter of individual liberties and, in particular, of protection from the intrusions of big government and the state. This is the vision of liberty outlined in the opening paragraph of this essay, one that drives conservative ideologues throughout the West. De Dijn argues, however, that this is not the only conception of freedom and that it is a relatively recent one. For much of human history, people thought of freedom not as protecting individual rights but as ensuring self-rule and the just treatment of all. In short, they equated freedom with democracy. “For centuries Western thinkers and political actors identified freedom not with being left alone by the state but with exercising control over the way one is governed,” she writes. Liberty in its classic formulation was thus not individual but collective. Freedom did not entail escaping from government rule but rather making it democratic.
You can read the full review at The Nation, HERE.
I don't know who I'm quoting, but I've heard it said that the freedom to swing your arm ends where my nose begins.
