"Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be."

--Alan Watts

 

"A person who works six hours a day but with total focus has an enormous advantage over a 12-hour-per-day workaholic who's "multi-tasking" all day, answering every phone call, constantly checking Facebook and Twitter, and indulging every interruption."

--Mike Elgan

 

"It has always been my province to dig up hidden mysteries, new things."

-- Joseph Smith, May 12th 1844

"What God leads into the desert, God brings out of the desert."

-- Orson Scott Card (physical/spiritual desert)

"A truth's initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn't the world being round that agitated people, but the fact that we world wasn't flat. When a well packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic."

-- Dresden James

"Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous."

-- Voltaire

"Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others."

-- Postel's Law

"The world shall not perish for a lack of wonders, but for a lack of wonder."

-- JBS Haldane

"I would not wrestle with whiskey, for I can not throw it."

-- Joseph Smith

"The fewer the worries you have, the more attractive you are."

-- Unknown

"Some people have a particularly strong hunger for God. Feeling on a regular basis an intensity of need that others don't typically experience, they are seekers. When they find alcohol before they find God, they may get stuck for a time."

-- M. Scott Peck

"Whatever weakens your reason,

Whatever increases the authority of your body over your mind,

Whatever impairs the tenderness of your conscience,

Whatever takes away your relish for things spiritual,

Whatever obscures your sense of God,

That is sin to you, no matter how innocent it may seem in itself."

-- John Wesley's Mother

"All art is pain expressing itself. I think all life is, everything we do, but particularly artists - That's why they're always vilified. They're always persecuted because they show pain, they can't help it. They express it in art and the way they live, and people don't like to see that reality that they're suffering."

-- John Lennon

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you NOT to be?

You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world.

There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of god that is within us.

It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

-- 1994 Inaugural Speech, Nelson Mandela

Only after the last tree has been cut down

Only after the last river has been poisoned

Only after the last fish has been caught

Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten

-- Cree Indian Prophecy

"I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power that can move the world."

-- Mahatma Gandhi (quoted in Homepower magazine Dec 2001/Jan 2002)

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, pull back the curtains, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."

-- Frank Zappa

"Secrecy is the cornerstone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy...censorship. When any government, or any church, for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mightily little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked; Contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; The most you can do is kill him." --Robert A. Heinlein

"A man must descend very low to find the force to rise again." -- Hasidic poem

"The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."

-- Steve Biko

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority it is time to pause and reflect."

-- Mark Twain

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,

makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even

passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and

upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got

to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to

the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be

prevented from working at all!"

-- Mario Savio

"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."

- H.L. Mencken

"History is written by the powerful/winners." - Foucault

"In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children. Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates." - Alan Turing

"Think of a piano. It does not have two kinds of notes on it - the 'right' notes and the 'wrong' ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another." - C.S.Lewis

"Whoever fears to submit any question to the test of free discussion loves his opinion more than he loves the truth."

"People don't get along because they fear each other. People fear each other because they don't know each other. People don't know each other because they have not properly communicated with each other." -Martin Luther King Jr.

"The study of the doctrines of the gospel will improve behavior quicker than a study of behavior will improve behavior. Preoccupation with unworthy behavior can lead to unworthy behavior. That is why we stress so forcefully the study of the doctrines of the gospel." -Boyd K. Packer

"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. What I can do, I should do. And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will do." – Edward Everett Hale

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are proscribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress ... People might not get all that they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get." - Frederick Douglass 1857

"Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences." -- Susan B. Anthony

"Wherefore, I call upon the weak things of the world, those who are unlearned and despised, to thrash the nations by the power of my Spirit." -- D&C 35:13

"Ye hear of wars in far countries, and you say that there will soon be great wars in far countries, but ye know not the hearts of men in your own land." -- D&C 38:29

"But behold, I am consigned that these are my days, and that my soul shall be filled with sorrow because of this the wickedness of my brethren." -- Helaman 7:9