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"They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech."
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"Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, "Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self," but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds."
Empathy
"It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after."
Ethics
"The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an alleory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest)."
Philosophy
"Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it."
Despair
"Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we're connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that's acceptance."
Forgiveness
"Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge."
Nature
"Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use, time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space - for wilderness and public space - must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space."
Imagination
"Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone."
Writing
"No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more."
Discovery
"Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia. Joy sneaks in anyway, abundance cascades forth uninvited...Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection."
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"Life is a flowing river. We came from earth and water. We will go back there after the magic of life."
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Personal Development
"Clear skies do not promise rain."
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Personal Development
"Spring dances with joy in every flower and in every bud letting us know that changes are beautiful and an inevitable law of life."
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Personal Development
"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."
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Personal Development
"Every flower returns to sleep with the earth."
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Personal Development
"Spring is the only season that flutters in on gentle wings and builds nests in our hearts."
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Personal Development
"Line in nature is not found;Unit and universe are round;In vain produced, all rays return;Evil will bless, and ice will burn."
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Personal Development
"A puddle repeats infinity, and is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud."
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Personal Development
"To country people Cows are mild,And flee from any stick they throw;But I'm a timid town bred child,And all the cattle seem to know."
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Personal Development
"The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn't sure it was worth all the effort."
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Personal Development
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