Great Throughts Treasury

"On one level, life is the process of seeking out and enjoying experiences - from the transcendent to the tragic. Life has as cyclical pattern of movement and appreciation; even when you’re not doing anything, you’re probably in a situation you sought. On another level, life is the experience of the self’s interaction with the world. The self can be broken down into three main elements and their corresponding activities: first, the heart (knowing compassion, receiving and giving love); second, the intellect (acquiring and digesting information); third, the senses (acting and being acted upon). It is the soul, however, that focuses and inspires all three the soul gives us resilience -an essential quality since we constantly have to rebound from hardship... The meaning of life can’t be understood without first looking at the self and its interaction with the world. In effect, this amounts to examining the inner workings of the soul of the universe." - Wynton Marsalis

"I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory. " -

"The refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life, flowers are dimmer and less fragrant, our loves less ecstaticâ but this psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies." - Joanna Macy, fully Joanna Rogers Macy

"‘One’ semantically represents the One God, the mystical One and Monism. However, in its detailed examination of the term ‘One,’ Hassidic philosophy finds that this term lacks a certain resilience and is not as watertight as the formulators of Hassidic thought would like. In their attempt to describe a higher and more consummate Oneness that they feel is the particular nature of the unio-mystica and also of Redemption. Moreover, as the idea of the ‘One God’ is the basis for ‘Monotheism,’ it is understandably a term, that although from a mystical perspective is interpreted as being beyond division, the mystical tradition feels that the idea has been misused and/or misunderstood as a description of the ‘One God of the world’ as opposed to the Monistic and mystical realisation of the Oneness of all Existence. Therefore, the term ‘Only’ is generally used in an attempt to describe the type of Oneness that expresses the mystical reality of there ‘Only’ being God." - Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe

"Positive self-esteem operates as, in effect, the immune system of the consciousness, providing resistance, strength, and a capacity for regeneration. When self-esteem is low, our resilience in the face of life's adversities is diminished. We crumble before vicissitudes that a healthier sense of self could vanquish. We tend to be more influenced by the desire to avoid pain than to experience joy. Negatives have more power over us than positives." - Nathaniel Branden

"I believe this movement will prevail. I don’t mean it will defeat, conquer, or create harm to someone else. Quite the opposite. I don’t tender the claim in an oracular sense. I mean that the thinking that informs the movement’s goals will reign. It will soon suffuse most institutions, but before then, it will change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal of centuries of frenzied self-destructive behavior. Some say it is too late, but people never change when they are comfortable. Helen Keller threw aside the gnawing fears of chronic bad news when she declared, “I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time!” In such a time, history is suspended and thus unfinished. It will be the stroke of midnight for the rest of our lives. My hopefulness about the resilience of human nature is matched by the gravity of our environmental and social condition. If we squander all our attention on what is wrong, we will miss the prize: In the chaos engulfing the world, a hopeful future resides because the past is disintegrating before us. If that is difficult to believe, take a winter off and calculate what it requires to create a single springtime. It’s not too late for the world’s largest institutions and corporations to join in saving the planet, but cooperation must be on the planet’s terms. The “Help Wanted” signs are everywhere. All people and institutions including commerce, governments, schools, churches and cities, need to learn from life and reimagine the world from the bottom up, based on the first principles if justice and ecology. Ecological restoration is extraordinarily simple: You remove whatever prevents the system from healing itself. Social restoration is no different. We have the heart, knowledge, money and sense to optimize out social and ecological fabric. It is time for all that is harmful to leave. One million escorts are here to transform the nightmares of empire and the disgrace of war on people and place. We are the transgressors and we are the forgivers. “We” means all of us, everyone. There can be no green movement unless there is also a black, brown and copper movement. What is more harmful resides within is, the accumulated wounds of the past, the sorrow, shame, deceit, and ignominy shared by every culture, passed down to every person, as surely as DNA, as history of violence and greed. There is not question that the environmental movement is most critical to our survival. Our house is literally burning, and it is only logical that environmentalists expect the social justice movement to get on the environmental bus. But is actually the other way around; the only way we are going to put out this fire is to get on the social justice bus and heal our wounds, because in the end, there is only one bus. Armed with that growing realization, we can address all that is harmful externally. What will guide us is a living intelligence that creates miracles every second, carried forth by a movement with no name." - Paul Hawken

" My hopefulness about the resilience of human nature is matched by the gravity of our environmental and social condition. If we squander all our attention on what is wrong, we will miss the prize: In the chaos engulfing the world, a hopeful future resides because the past is disintegrating before us. If that is difficult to believe, take a winter off and calculate what it requires to create a single springtime. It's not too late for the world's largest institutions and corporations to join in saving he planet, but cooperation must be on the planet's terms." - Paul Hawken

"Despite their economic advantages, specialization and globalization in some ways reduce resilience " - Richard Heinberg

"A true social revolution requires a spiritual transformation of the masses degraded by centuries of bourgeois class rule and that it is only by extirpating the habits of obedience and servility to the last roots that the working class can acquire the understanding of a new form of self-discipline. [paraphrase by Noam Chomsky]" - Rosa Luxemburg, aka Rosalia Luxemburg, "Bloody Rosa"

"A bachelor is a man who comes to work each morning from a different direction." - Sholem Aleichem, pen name of Sholem Yakovf Rabinowitz or Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich

"Israel was an experimental social revolution in that ancient world, to see whether social relationships could be organized in human, egalitarian, communitarian ways." - Walter Brueggemann

"The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it." - Warren Bennis, fully Warren Gamaliel Bennis