Harold Gibbons > Harold's Quotes

“Every man's foremost task is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved.”
― Martin Buber

“The Tantric sages tell us that our in-breath and out-breath actually mirror the divine creative gesture. With the inhalation, we draw into our own center, our own being. With the exhalation, we expand outward into the world.”
― Sally Kempton, Awakening Shakti: The Transformative Power of the Goddesses of Yoga

“The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.”
― Martin Buber

“People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.”
― Noam Chomsky

“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”
― Bertrand Russell

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”
― Edward Abbey

“People should aim to make contact with their divine spark, to release their inner divinity, to transform themselves beyond recognition and express their higher, hidden selves…to “become God”.”
― Adam Weishaupt, The Movement: The Revolution Will Be Televised

“Watch your habits, for they become your posture. Watch your posture, for it creates your boundaries. Watch your boundaries, for they restrict your growth. Watch your restrictions, for they create immobility. Watch your immobility, for it becomes your illness.”
― Katy Bowman, Alignment Matters: The First Five Years of Katy Says

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“Feeling is a kinesthetic rather than a cognitive experience. It is the process of shifting the focus of your awareness off of thinking and onto your affects, energetic states and sensations. It is the proverbial “getting out of your head” and “getting into your body.”
― Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving

“When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”
― Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

“Movement is key to dissipating negativity in community relations. Typically, dominant powers will attempt to ghettoize their opponents during periods of open conflict, in an attempt to better monitor and control them. We have found that these are the ideal conditions for the intensification of malignancy in conflict; hostilities are more likely to fester and grow when groups are constrained in one location. This is exactly what occurred during the independence struggle in Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, when the French limited the movement of non-French Algerians to the Kasbah. This constraint led to the festering of resentments and the organization of insurgents. Alternatively, systems where negativity is relatively unconstrained, and where members of groups are allowed to travel and disperse, will tend to show a dissipation of negativity over time. This is a counterintuitive finding with substantial implications for policy and practice.”
― Peter T. Coleman, The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts

“Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty...the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mark of cruelty.”
― James Baldwin

“A body in motion is a body endowed with kinaesthesis. The word kinaesthesis comes from the Greek word kinein, meaning to move, and aisthesia, to perceive. Kinaesthesis is thus the sense that informs you of what your body is doing in space through the perception or sensation of movement in the joints, tendons, and muscles … Kinaesthesis is therefore an embodied sense of awareness, and perhaps most akin to having an adventurous experience.”
― Neil Lewis

“The true direction of walking is not towards otherness (other worlds, other faces, other cultures, other civilizations); it is towards the edge of civilized worlds, whatever they may be. Walking is setting oneself apart: at the edge of those who work, at the edges of high-speed roads, at the edge of the producers of profit and poverty, exploiters, labourers, and at the edge of those serious people who always have something better to do than receive the pale gentleness of a winter sun or the freshness of a spring breeze”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“The Revolution will be live. And where will you be? In the historic pictures being beamed around the world, or watching at home in your comfortable seat, just as you have watched everything else, including your whole life, passing you by? Change isn’t the responsibility of others. It’s yours.”
― Adam Weishaupt, The Movement: The Revolution Will Be Televised

“The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“It seems sometimes that people take a deliberately myopic view and fill their eyes with things seen microscopically in order not to see macrosopically.”
― Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory

“Welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club! Third rule of Fight Club: if someone yells “stop!”, goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule: only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule: one fight at a time, fellas. Sixth rule: the fights are bare knuckle. No shirt, no shoes, no weapons. Seventh rule: fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Fight Club, you have to fight.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.”
― Aldous Huxley

“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. ... Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights.”
― John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk To The Gulf

“Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.”
― Albert Camus

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
― Albert Camus

“An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.”
― Albert Camus

“Free choice only comes from thinking; it doesn’t come from emotions. It emerges from the capacity to think about your emotions.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction