Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Face in the mirror

When you get what you want in your struggle for self
and the world makes you king for the day,
Just go to the mirror and look at yourself
and see what that man has to say.

For it isn't your father or mother or wife
whose judgement upon you must pass
The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life
is the one staring back from the glass

You may be like Jack Horner and chisel a plum
and think you're a wonderful guy.
But the man in the glass says you're only a bum
if you can't look him straight in the eye

He's the fellow to please - never mind all the rest,
for he's with you clear to the end.
and you've passed your most dangerous, difficult test
if the man in the glass is your friend.

You may fool the whole world down the pathway of years
and get pats on the back as you pass.
but your final reward will be heartache and tears
if you've cheated the man in the glass.

Friedrich von Schiller

Love therefore—the most beautiful phenomenon in the soul-filled creation, the omnipotent magnet in the spiritual world, the source of devotion and of the most sublime virtue—Love is only the reflection of this single original power, an attraction of the excellent, grounded upon an instantaneous exchange of the personality, a confusion of the beings.

When I hate, so take I something from myself; when I love, so become I so much the richer, by what I love. Forgiveness is the recovery of an alienated property - hatred of man a prolonged suicide; egoism the highest poverty of a created being.

Rilke'

"...then take your fate upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking for that reward which might come from without."

-Letters to a Young Poet


"Fate loves to invent patterns and designs. Its difficulty lies in complexity. But life itself is difficult because of its simplicity. It has only a few things of grandeur not fit for us."

-Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge


"Never think destiny's more than the substrate of childhood: how often you'd catch up with a lover, panting, panting, from the happy chase, into the open forever."

-The Duino Elegies: The Seventh Elegy


"..why, then, do we have to be human and, avoiding fate, long for fate?"

-The Duino Elegies: The Ninth Elegy

Gilda Radner

"I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end.

Life is about not knowing... having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.

Delicious ambiguity."