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1 " I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning. "
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry , Wind, Sand and Stars
2 " Reading list (1972 edition)[edit]1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey2. The Old Testament3. Aeschylus – Tragedies4. Sophocles – Tragedies5. Herodotus – Histories6. Euripides – Tragedies7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings9. Aristophanes – Comedies10. Plato – Dialogues11. Aristotle – Works12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus13. Euclid – Elements14. Archimedes – Works15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections16. Cicero – Works17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things18. Virgil – Works19. Horace – Works20. Livy – History of Rome21. Ovid – Works22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion26. Ptolemy – Almagest27. Lucian – Works28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties30. The New Testament31. Plotinus – The Enneads32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine33. The Song of Roland34. The Nibelungenlied35. The Saga of Burnt Njál36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres43. Thomas More – Utopia44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy58. John Milton – Works59. Molière – Comedies60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal69. William Congreve – The Way of the World70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets "
― Mortimer J. Adler , How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
3 " But in truth, neither the lonely meditations of the hermit nor the turmulos raptures of the reveller, are capable of satisfying man’s heart. From the one we gather unquiet speculation, from the other satiety. The mind flags beneath the weight of thought, and droops in thee heartless intercourse of those whose sole aim is amusement. There is no fruition in their vacant kindness, and sharp rocs lur beneath the smiling ripples of these shallow waters. "
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
4 " Micro meditations should be performed with very little activity. These practices should not be associated with any goal, concept or belief. "
― Amit Ray , Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style
5 " Many religions have meditations on death to let it penetrate our thick skulls that life doesn’t last forever. "
― Pema Chödrön , The Pocket Pema Chodron
6 " If you are planning to meditate and imagine all the demigods in the darkness then you would become Schizophrenic. Most of the meditations Centres make you become the victim of Schizophrenic, which is the mental disorder of hallucinating. "
― Vishal Chipkar, , Enter Heaven
7 " FRIENDOnly when you have walked with me through the valley of hardship...When you have fought beside me against an evil foe...When you have cried with me through a painful heartache...When you have laughed with me at life joyous moments...When you have held my hand in silent sorrow at my loss...When you have trusted me in spite of your doubts,,,When you have believed in me when I lacked confidence to believe in my self...When you have defended my honor against lying tongues...When you have prayed for me when I was temped to go wrong...When you have stood with me as others walked away...Then and only then can you call me friend. For then you truly know ME. Then you will have paid the price of sisterhood/brotherhood. Then you will have forged a bond that will transcend time and live beyond life. Then you will truly be called a FRIEND who sticks closer than a brother...© 2013 From the book Meditations From my Garden by Stella Payton "
― Stella Payton
8 " The first recipe for happiness is: Avoid too lengthy meditations on the past. "
9 " In consequence of the inevitably scattered and fragmentary nature of our thinking, which has been mentioned, and of the mixing together of the most heterogeneous representations thus brought about and inherent even in the noblest human mind, we really possess only *half a consciousness*. With this we grope about in the labyrinth of our life and in the obscurity of our investigations; bright moments illuminate our path like flashes of lighting. But what is to be expected generally from heads of which even the wisest is every night the playground of the strangest and most senseless dreams, and has to take up its meditations again on emerging from these dreams? Obviously a consciousness subject to such great limitations is little fitted to explore and fathom the riddle of the world; and to beings of a higher order, whose intellect did not have time as its form, and whose thinking therefore had true completeness and unity, such an endeavor would necessarily appear strange and pitiable. In fact, it is a wonder that we are not completely confused by the extremely heterogeneous mixture of fragments of representations and of ideas of every kind which are constantly crossing one another in our heads, but that we are always able to find our way again, and to adapt and adjust everything. Obviously there must exist a simple thread on which everything is arranged side by side: but what is this? Memory alone is not enough, since it has essential limitations of which I shall shortly speak; moreover, it is extremely imperfect and treacherous. The *logical ego*, or even the *transcendental synthetic unity of apperception*, are expressions and explanations that will not readily serve to make the matter comprehensible; on the contrary, it will occur to many that“Your wards are deftly wrought, but drive no bolts asunder.”Kant’s proposition: “The *I think* must accompany all our representations ,” is insufficient; for the “I” is an unknown quantity, in other words, it is itself a mystery and a secret. What gives unity and sequence to consciousness, since by pervading all the representations of consciousness, it is its substratum, its permanent supporter, cannot itself be conditioned by consciousness, and therefore cannot be a representation. On the contrary, it must be the *prius* of consciousness, and the root of the tree of which consciousness is the fruit. This, I say, is the *will*; it alone is unalterable and absolutely identical, and has brought forth consciousness for its own ends. It is therefore the will that gives unity and holds all its representations and ideas together, accompanying them, as it were, like a continuous ground-bass. Without it the intellect would have no more unity of consciousness than has a mirror, in which now one thing now another presents itself in succession, or at most only as much as a convex mirror has, whose rays converge at an imaginary point behind its surface. But it is *the will* alone that is permanent and unchangeable in consciousness. It is the will that holds all ideas and representations together as means to its ends, tinges them with the colour of its character, its mood, and its interest, commands the attention, and holds the thread of motives in its hand. The influence of these motives ultimately puts into action memory and the association of ideas. Fundamentally it is the will that is spoken of whenever “I” occurs in a judgement. Therefore, the will is the true and ultimate point of unity of consciousness, and the bond of all its functions and acts. It does not, however, itself belong to the intellect, but is only its root, origin, and controller." —from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne in two volumes: volume II, pp. 139-140 "
