One can't stand forever on the shore...

One can't stand forever on the shore.  At some point, filled with indecision, skepticism, reservation and doubt, you can either jump in or concede that life is forever elsewhere.

 

- Arthur Miller

George Bernard Shaw

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.

. . .

 

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the work to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Pablo Picasso

Action is the foundational key to all success.

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

- Helen Keller 

Opportunity

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

 

- Thomas Edison

Macchu Picchu

 

Macchu Picchu

 

Macchu Picchu

 

Macchu Picchu

 

Winaywayna - On the Trail to Macchu Picchu

Olantaytamba - Sol y Luna

 

Cuzco

 

Flight to Cuzco

 

Galapagos

 

Galapagos

 

From a Plane Over Ecuador

 

Ship Life - The Galapagos Legend

 

Snorkeling Galapagos with a Friend

 

Life Before Death

I believe in life before death.

Some Nietzsche

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

 

***

 

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are - more humane.

***

 

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.

...the stars make me dream

“For my part, I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream."

 

-- Van Gogh

A magical rose garden over the horizon

“One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon--instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.”

 

- Dale Carnegie

Avoid small people

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."

 

- Mark Twain

Knowing neither victory nor defeat

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor souls who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."

 

- Theodore Roosevelt

Explore

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

 

- Mark Twain

It is what you think about

"It isn't what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about."

 

- Dale Carnegie

My reality

I live not in dreams, but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future

 

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Understanding Each Other

"And left alone to sleep within a shuttered room, with the thick sunlight printed in bars upon the floor, unfathomable loneliness and sadness crept through him: he saw his life down the solemn vista of a forest aisle, and he knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages.  Lost.  He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us.  Never, never, never, never, never.

 

He saw that the great figures that came and went about him, the huge leering heads that bent hideously into his crib, the great voices that rolled incoherently above him, had for one another not much greater understanding than they had for him: that even their speech, their entire fluidity and ease of movement were but meager communicants of their thought or feeling, and served often not to promote understanding, but to deepen and widen strife, bitterness, and prejudice."

Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

Lightening

Lightening
Originally uploaded by Cira.

Delicious Ambiguity

"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." ~ Gilda Radner

"I am waiting for a sign that will indicate to me what meaning I must give to my life, but right now my existence is satisfactory." ~ Lucy Lawless

"If you're careful enough, nothing bad or good will ever happen to you." ~ (origin unknown)

"Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering— and it's all over much too soon." ~ Woody Allen

"So many people tiptoe carefully through life to arrive safely at death." ~ (origin unknown)

“Life may have no meaning. Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove.” ~ Ashleigh Brilliant

Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits--on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold

Uncle Walt on Wisdom

Here is the test of wisdom;
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools;
Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it, to another not having it;
Wisdom is of the Soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities, and is content,
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the Soul.

Walt Whitman, from Song of the Open Road

Love After Love

The time will come when,
with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving at your own door,
in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread.
Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life,
whom you ignored for another,
who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit.
Feast on your life.

Derek Wolcott

Dancing Like a Dingledody

But they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, made to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes Awww!

Jack Kerouac, On the Road