Does what goes on inside show on the outside? Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney.

Vincent Van Gogh

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

Henry Beston 

My source: Instagram

In dark times, poetry and music often become more important to us, providing the kind of transcendence we need to interpret painful events in a wider context.


Cassie Werber
From Here

'Facts speak only when the historian calls on them," wrote the historian EH Carr in his landmark work, What Is History? "It is he who decides which facts to give the floor and in what order or context. It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar's crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all."


Quoted by Gary Younge
on She would not be moved (The Guardian)

Swami Chinmayanandaji's thought for the day:
The most perfect characteristic in an eminently successful life seems to be integrity - an inflexible, undaunted, firm integrity. And,  also, it seems that everyone who has cultivated this trait has drawn from it many an unseen and personal advantage over others who are striving in the same field of achievement.
The nobility of integrity is not merely in its honour, sincerity, our honesty in action, but it is rooted deeper in its quality and beauty of one's intentions. If the spring of our every thought is pure and if we have the heroism to live unfailingly ever true to the great ideals in ourselves, however impractical and utopian they may be, even inspite of all immediate failures, we still have cultivated integrity.
The personality in us, thereafter, with glowing poise unfolds, and at each apparent failure, with each insurmountable obstacle met, in each moment of social criticism faced, and from all empty laughter of pithless ridicule endured, we come to steel our nobility and reinforce our determination to live the honourable life consistent with our ideals and our goals.
Such individuals alone are evolvers, all others are mere adapters - at every turn compromising with circumstances adjusting to the changing patterns of challenges. They may struggle on, as hapless slaves to their habits, but never can they come to dominate the outer field and command the world to march to the appointed Goal or end, chosen by their own vision and will. Only a person of integrity has this power over life and it's happenings. Naturally,  then, integrity is the essential core of all eminently successful life.

Source:
Book - We Must

Swami Chinmayanandaji's thought for the day:
The most perfect characteristic in an eminently successful life seems to be integrity - an inflexible, undaunted, firm integrity. And,  also, it seems that everyone who has cultivated this trait has drawn from it many an unseen and personal advantage over others who are striving in the same field of achievement.
The nobility of integrity is not merely in its honour, sincerity, our honesty in action, but it is rooted deeper in its quality and beauty of one's intentions. If the spring of our every thought is pure and if we have the heroism to live unfailingly ever true to the great ideals in ourselves, however impractical and utopian they may be, even inspite of all immediate failures, we still have cultivated integrity.
The personality in us, thereafter, with glowing poise unfolds, and at each apparent failure, with each insurmountable obstacle met, in each moment of social criticism faced, and from all empty laughter of pithless ridicule endured, we come to steel our nobility and reinforce our determination to live the honourable life consistent with our ideals and our goals.
Such individuals alone are evolvers, all others are mere adapters - at every turn compromising with circumstances adjusting to the changing patterns of challenges. They may struggle on, as hapless slaves to their habits, but never can they come to dominate the outer field and command the world to march to the appointed Goal or end, chosen by their own vision and will. Only a person of integrity has this power over life and it's happenings. Naturally,  then, integrity is the essential core of all eminently successful life.

Source:
Book - We Must

We stand as one family
bound to each other
with love and respect

We serve as an army
courageous and disciplined
ever ready to fight against
all low tendencies and false values,
within and without us.

We live honestly
the noble life of sacrifice and service
producing more than what we consume
and giving more than what we take.

We seek the Lord's grace
to keep us on the path
of virtue, courage and wisdom.

May Thy grace and blessings
flow through us
to the world around us.

We believe that the
service of our country
is the service of the Lord of lords
and devotion to the people
Is the devotion to the Supreme Self.

We know our responsibilities
Give us the ability and courage to fulfil them.

Om Tat Sat

Chinmaya Mission Pledge
by Swami Chinmayananda

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." 

 Marianne Williamson

2. It's about content, not taste
One thing that I've attempted, with limited success, to bang into the skulls of countless young writers over the years is that there's a fundamental difference between a review and an opinion. The former is about assessing the strengths and weaknesses of a piece of work within the context in which it's being presented, and the latter is about expressing your special precious feels because you're a beautiful snowflake unicorn.

Andrew P Street

on www.dailylife.com

Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Senator, on expecting the unexpected:

"Never be so faithful to your plan that you are unwilling to consider the unexpected. Never be so faithful to your plan that you are unwilling to entertain the improbable opportunity that comes looking for you. And never be so faithful to your plan that when you hit a bump in the road -- or when the bumps hit you – you don't have the fortitude, grace and resiliency to rethink and regroup... Plans or no plans, keep a little space in your heart for the improbable. You won't regret it."

False memories allow us to forgive ourselves and justify our mistakes, but sometimes at a high price: an inability to take responsibility for our lives. An appreciation of the distortions of memory, a realization that even deeply felt memories might be wrong, might encourage people to hold their memories more lightly, to drop the certainty that their memories are always accurate, and to let go of the appealing impulse to use the past to justify problems of the present. If we are to be careful about what we wish for because it might come true, we must also be careful which memories we select to justify our lives, because then we will have to live by them. Certainly one of the most powerful stories that many people wish to live by is the victim narrative.

Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson
In
Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts

Ourself, behind ourself concealed,
Should startle most;
Assassin, hid in our apartment,	15
Be horror’s least. Emily Dickinson, in ONE need not be a chamber to be haunted

Our faculty of attention affects us in countless ways. Our very perception of reality is tied closely to where we focus our attention. Only what we pay attention to seems real to us, whereas whatever we ignore—no matter how important it may be—seems to fade into insignificance. The American philosopher and pioneer of modern psychology William James summed up this point more than a century ago: “For the moment, what we attend to is reality.”1 Obviously, he wasn’t suggesting that things become nonexistent when we ignore them; many things of which we are unaware exert powerful influences on our lives and the world as a whole. But by ignoring them, we are not including them in our reality. We do not really register them as existing at all.

Each of us chooses, by our ways of attending to things, the universe we inhabit and the people we encounter. But for most of us, this “choice” is unconscious, so it's not really a choice at all. When we think about who we are, we can't possibly remember all the things we’ve experienced, all the behaviors and qualities we have exhibited. What comes to mind when we ask “Who am I?” consists of those things we have been paying attention to over the years. The same goes for our impressions of other people. The reality that appears to us is not so much what’s out there as it is those aspects of the world we have focused on.

B Alan Wallace
in The Attention Revolution

Mr. A's answer is so dumb, that if i ever killed myself i will leave this as a note. (the idea to use this as suicide note is also not original, btw)

In essence, neurosis is a distorted way of looking at the world and at oneself, determined by compulsive needs rather than by a genuine interest in the world as it is.

The opposite of neurosis is a condition Horney calls self-realization, which is when an individual responds to the world with the full depth of his or her spontaneous feelings rather than just anxiety-driven compulsion, resulting in the person growing to actualize his or her inborn potentialities.

on Neurosis from Wikipedia

New York
November 10, 1958

Dear Thom:

We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.

First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second—There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply—of course it isn’t puppy love.

But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it—and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

If you love someone—there is no possible harm in saying so—only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another—but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.

We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Love,

Fa

From Letters of Note

Learning about music became, for all intents and purposes, an  addiction. Each new note, each new chord, each new scale and each new rhythm brought me closer to something that I desperately longed for: the capacity to make my own music. ... When I read some new neuroimaging studies that suggested that new knowledge can bring the same sort of surge of dopamine one might get by ingesting crack cocaine, I could only nod in agreement. ... creating my own music [was] an adventure that seemed to bring me into a new place altogether: meditative, beautiful, intoxicating.

Gary Marcus,
in Guitar Zero   

For two thousand years Jerusalem has brought out the least attractive qualities in every race that has lived there. The Holy City has had more atrocities committed in it, more consistently, than any other town in the world. Sacred to three religions, the city has witnessed the worst  intolerance and self righteousness of all of them.

William Dalrymple
In Xanadu

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen

― Elisabeth Kubler-Ross