Is the smile on a dog."

— Bruce Lee

"There are old bikers, and there are bold bikers, but there ain’t no old, bold bikers."

— classic biker aphorism

"Shit Happens. . ."

— classic biker aphorism

"You can’t polish a turd. . ."

— old hillbilly sayin’

— seen on a bottlecap from "Magic Hat Brewing Company"

— Tzu-hsia

"There are three things which the gentleman values most in the Way: to stay clear of violence by putting on a serious countenance, to come close to being trusted by setting a proper expression on his face, and to avoid being boorish and unreasonable by speaking in proper tones."

— Confucius

"The man who enjoys keenly, is subject to keen suffering; while he who feels but little pain is capable of feeling but little joy."

— The Kybalion

"My religion is Kindness."

— the Dalai Lama

"Selfishness is the root of all evil."

— Scribe 27 (RWT)

"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become."

— Buddha

"Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind."

— William James

"There are four things that come not back:

The spoken word,

The sped arrow,

The past life,

The neglected opportunity."

"Do more than exist — live.

Do more than touch — feel.

Do more than look — observe.

Do more than read — absorb.

Do more than hear — listen.

Do more than listen — understand."

"The nine impediments that hinder the mind or consciousness from gaining tranquility are disease, mental sluggishness, doubt, carelessness, physical laziness, uncontrolled sensual craving, delusion, lack of perseverance and instability."

— Patanjali, from Samadhipada, #30

"As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, and disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation — or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place of where your mind’s wings should have grown."

"THE ALL IS UNKNOWABLE. All the theories, guesses, and speculations of the theologians and metaphysicians regarding the inner nature of the ALL are but childish efforts to grasp the secret of the Infinite. Such efforts have always failed and will always fail, from the very nature of the task. And still more presumptuous are those who attempt to ascribe to the ALL the personalities, characteristics, and attributes of themselves, ascribing to the ALL the human emotions, feelings, and characteristics, even down to the pettiest qualities of mankind, such as jealousy, susceptibility to flattery and praise, and desire for offerings and worship. The ALL is Infinite Living Mind — the Illumined call it SPIRIT!"

— from The Kybalion

"Mountains cannot be your guru . . . . Are you able to have a little room where you can close the door and be alone? . . . That is your cave. That is your sacred mountain. That is where you will find the kingdom of God."

— Ram Gopal Babu, from Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda (p. 161)

"It hath been said that the continuation of the species is due to man’s forgiving. Forgiveness is holiness; by forgiveness the universe is held together. Forgiveness is the might of the mighty; forgiveness is sacrifice; forgiveness is quiet of mind. Forgiveness and gentleness are the qualities of the Self-possessed. They represent eternal virtue."

— from the Mahabharata

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, pitch manure, solve equations, analyze a new problem, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for the insects."

— Robert Heinlein, from The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

". . . any virtue becomes a vice unless it is balanced by its own opposite. Beauty, when unsustained by strength, is vapid, lifeless. Power is insufferable when untempered by compassion. Honor, unless balanced by humility, becomes arrogance; and mirth, when not deepened by reverence, becomes mere superficiality."

— Starhawk, from The Spiral Dance (p. 84)

"To the pure, all things are pure; to the base, all things are base."

— from The Kybalion

"The man who enjoys keenly, is subject to keen suffering; while he who feels but little pain is capable of feeling but little joy."

— from The Kybalion

"Don’t get involved in a threesome — someone always gets pissed off."

— Papa Titus

"Don’t put yer food in the microwave — it turns it all backwards and shit."

"The only reason stereotypes exist is because they happen to be accurate so damn often."

— Spider 1%er

"Hell is other people."

— Jean-Paul Sartre

"Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry."

— Henry Ward Beecher, from Life Thoughts

"Beware the fury of a patient man."

— John Dryden, from Absalom and Achitophel

"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body."

— Richard Steele

"A man’s got to know his limitations."

— unknown

"Estrangement permeates our society so strongly that to us it seems to be consciousness itself. Even the language for other possibilities has disappeared or been deliberately twisted. Yet another form of consciousness is possible. Indeed, it has existed from earliest times, underlies other cultures, and has survived even in the West in hidden streams. This is the consciousness I call immanence — the awareness of the world and everything in it as alive, dynamic, interdependent, interacting, and infused with living energies: a living being, a weaving dance."

"The without is like the within of things; the small is like the large."

— Hermes Trimegistus

". . . our physical world of the senses is a mere illusion, a world of shadows, and he three-dimensional tool we call our body serves only as a container or dwelling place for Something infinitely greater and more comprehensive . . ."

— Holger Kalweit, from Dreamtime and Inner Space

"I believe that the phenomenon is one of the ways through which an intelligence of incredible complexity is communicating with us symbolically. There is no indication that it is extraterrestrial. Instead, there is mounting evidence that it . . . (comes from) other dimensions beyond spacetime; from a multiverse which is all around us, and of which we have stubbornly refused to consider in spite of the evidence available to us for centuries."

— Jacques Vallee, from Dimensions (p. 284-289)

"There is no reason why anyone cannot get an education if he or she wants it badly enough and is persistent. Most cities have libraries, and often state libraries will mail books to a reader. Books are available on every conceivable subject and there are many good ‘how to’ books from which one can learn the basics of a trade. . . .Our libraries are not cloisters for an elite. They are for the people, and if they are not used, the fault belongs to those who do not take advantage of their wealth. If one does not move on from what merely amuses to what interests, the fault lies with the reader, for everything is there."

— Louis L’Amour, from Education of a Wandering Man (pp. 14, 192)

"Don’t cry, children — it’s Salisbury steak day!"

"The Way of the Sword and the Way of Zen are identical, for they have the same purpose — that of killing the ego."

— Yamada Jirokichi

"So, instead of telling us what the problem is, Zen insists that our whole trouble is just our failure to realize that there is no problem. And, of course, this means that there is no solution, either."

"To confuse the indivisible nature of reality with the conceptual pigeonholes of language is the basic ignorance from which Zen seeks to free us. The ultimate answers to existence are not to be found in intellectual concepts and philosophies, however sophisticated, but rather in a level of direct nonconceptual experience."

— samurai maxim

"When the swordsman stands against his opponent, he is not to think of the opponent, nor of his enemy’s sword movements. He just stands there with his sword which, forgetful of all technique, is ready only to follow the dictates of the unconscious. The man has effaced himself as the wielder of the sword. When he strikes, it is not the man but the sword in the hand of the unconscious that strikes."

— Takuan

— The SubGenius Foundation

"Why have you fucked with my serenity?"

— "Chains," the main bad-guy from the great biker movie Stone Cold

"We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing."

"It all happened in a few seconds, but it felt like hours."

— Ralph "Sonny" Barger, from Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free (p. 105)

"When the shit’s going down, it’s like you’re in a time warp, or sumpthin.’ You’re speedin’ down the freeway at 140 mph, and it seems like the other cars are barely movin’ at all. Some fucker’s charging at you with a naked blade, and it seems like he’s runnin’ in slow motion. I’ve actually seen bullets flying through the air just in time to move outta the way! Some folks’ll say that sorta thing’s ‘impossible.’ Maybe so, but I know what I’ve seen, and I know that other people have seen the same thing too. No eggheaded dipshit is gonna be able to convince me that I didn’t see these things, because I did."

"The most noticeable psychological effect is, as in sensory deprivation, one of the slowing down of time: second hands on clocks seem hardly to move. This sort of ‘eternal present’ is very much like a prolonged version of the way time can stand still in moments of great personal danger."

— Lyall Watson, from Supernature (p. 241)

"The speed at which time passes depends on ‘absorption,’ that is, on how focused the mind is. The reason we assume that all time intervals are the same is that we have invented clocks that measure time as if that were the case — 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour. But in reality we experience time far more subjectively, so that at various times it seems to speed up, slow down, or stand still. In flow, the sense of time adapts itself to the action at hand."

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, from Good Business (p. 54)

"A mind free of thought,

merged within itself,

beholds the essence of Tao

A mind filled with thought,

identified with its own perceptions,

beholds the mere forms of this world"

— Lao Tzu, from Tao Te Ching, The Definitive Edition (Star translation), Verse 1

"The idea behind the so-called empty mind is the surcease of all thought. Since we cannot create an empty mind by forcing out our thoughts, we do it by doing nothing at all. We make no attempt at forcing anything to happen to us, or to prevent anything from happening."

— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (p. 176)

"I have learned that there is a space in my head where I can go where no one can get to me. Often when I’m on the street, that’s where I am. I have learned to find open fields in the space of the seat on a bus."

"The study of Zen teaches to live in the moment, and in reality it’s all we really have, the here and now. . . . We exist in the fleeting moment. The past is gone the moment it is experienced and the future has yet to happen. . . . You must deal only with the present, moment by moment, second by second."

— Richard Ryan, from Master of the Blade (p. 79)

"What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?"

— Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, V

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in a confederacy against him."

— John Dewey (1899)

"If a man could understand all the horror of the lives of ordinary people who are turning around in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims, if he could understand what they are losing, he would understand that there can be only one thing that is serious for him — to escape from the general law, to be free."

— G. I. Gurdjieff

"A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good."

— Thomas J. Watson, Jr.

"Do not choose to be wrong for the sake of being different."

— Lord Samuel

"To be alone is to be different, to be different is to be alone."

— Suzanne Gordon, from Lonely in America

"Alienation produces eccentrics or revolutionaries."

"You won’t have a future if you don’t make one for yourself. It is as simple as that. If you accept the forms that be, then you are doomed, to your own ultimate blandness."

— John Lydon

"We are a group of complete individuals, and I mean individuals. Every one of us has a different reason for being who we are."

"The sage does not care whether or not anyone follows his teachings or ideas. To care would be to have ego. The sage does what he has to, what he is ‘told’ to do by his own voices from within. If no-one even listens to him, he does not care. He has done his job and therefore fulfilled his reason for being."

"Since when was genius found respectable?"

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Aurora Leigh

"To be great is to be misunderstood."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Self-Reliance

"One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude."

"We must overcome the notion that we must be regular . . . it robs you of the chance to be extraordinary and leads you to the mediocre."

— Uta Hagen

"Self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others."

— Joan Didion

"One must live the way one thinks or wind up thinking the way one has lived."

— Paul Bourget

"Whoever would make of himself a distinctive individual must be keen to perceive what he is not."

"Intuitive flashes are transient, spontaneous altered states of consciousness consisting of particular sensory experience or thoughts, coupled with strong emotional reactions . . ."

— Andrew Weil, from The Natural Mind

"Trust your instincts. ‘Intuition’ can be the result of your subconscious comparing non-verbal cues to past experiences; your olfactory gland registering the nearly imperceptible trace of certain hormones being released; or possibly something even more subtle and incomprehensible, yet real nonetheless. Intuition often proves true — disregard it at your peril."

— C. R. Jahn, from Hardcore Self-Defense (p. 37)

"There are three types of sweat: the sweat of strenuous labor, the sweat of fear, and the sweat of insanity — all of which have a separate and distinct aroma recognizable to the limbic brain."

"Ask someone who’s been in combat if he ever had a feeling that he was going to get hit right before a firefight. You’ll be amazed at the number of stories you’ll hear about people hitting the deck a split second before a bullet whizzes through where they just were. Some people even hear voices that say ‘duck.’. . . If you’ve got this gift, listen to it! It can and will save your ass!"

"I had this sense of danger. I felt the sensation of something almost gripping me at the back of the neck. I turned around and there, about twenty yards away, was a chap in a uniform with a red star on his cap gazing hard at me. He was bringing his rifle up and I knew one of us was going to be killed. I shot him before he shot me, so I have lived to tell the tale."

— William Carter (referring to an incident in 1951 Malaya)

"Within one second prior to actual termination, a target would somehow seem to make eye contact with me. I am convinced that these people somehow sensed my presence at distances over one mile. They did so with uncanny accuracy, in effect to stare down my scope."

— Robert Hendrickson, USMC Scout/Sniper

"I have lived through a dozen or more such freak near-misses. But something has always saved me at the last moment. Maybe it was my guardian angel that alerted me. . . . I believe they telepathically warn people at such times when, unbeknownst to them, their lives are in grave danger. Some people hear and react to these warnings, others do not."

"Intuition is not a close faculty or a quirky gift that some people have and some don’t, but a natural sense that all living creatures are born with. Intuition is a partnership between the one who feels it and the all-life that sends signals to be felt. Intuition is a flow of energy between Spirit . . . and the alert being who receives that flow and understands the messages within it. . . . In Western society, we are taught to ignore our psychic sense, and so most of us lose touch with it in early childhood."

"The warrior bets his life on his intuitive decision making. . . . In war fighting, it is a truism that certain people possess intangible qualities that make them good point men. . . . Successful point men have the intuition that leads their patrol safely through great danger. They simply ‘feel’ where ambushes are. They sense danger lurking in the bush. They know when to stop, proceed, or run. This sixth sense is renowned throughout the combat arms of fighting forces around the world."

— from The Warrior’s Edge, by Col. John B. Alexander, Major Richard Groller, and Janet Morris (pp. 113-114)

"The warrior who is sensitive to synchronicity can generate luck. . . . To harness synchronicity, the warrior must become a focus of coincidence. Simple coincidence may be chance. Multiple coincidences linked by correspondence and interconnectedness are called luck — unless one is consciously trying to generate such coincidences. . . . The individual who applies the same techniques to life is using the warrior’s edge to make precognition an ally. . . . The warrior manipulates coincidence to create luck. As any warrior knows, it doesn’t matter how good you are if you aren’t lucky."

"Instinct is the sum of information collected by your senses that is not readily obvious to your conscious mind. It often produces a ‘feeling’ that something is wrong or right without a logical explanation. When you are uncertain what to do next or how to handle an opponent, rely on your gut feelings. The more experience you have in combat, the more reliable your instincts will be."

"Statistics indicate that such sightings are indeed rare events, perhaps akin to the sighting of an extremely rare or unnamed species of bird (and how would you prove that on a walk through the mountains and woods you had sighted a California condor?) though not as rare as finding a coelacanth in the ocean depths."

— J. Allen Hynek

"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself, now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

— Sir Isaac Newton

"Once you see something as false which you have accepted as true, you can never go back to it."

— J. Krishnamurti (paraphrased)

"90% of everything is crap."

"Even when one compromises, one should never compromise in regard to the basic truth."

"Truth is the only safe ground to stand upon."

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1895)

"Not only are there many conflicting truths as there are people to claim them; there are equally multitudinous and conflicting truths within the individual."

— Virginia Peterson, from A Matter of Life and Death

"Opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled."

"Just as some cheap magazines are deliberately written to generate fear in the public and to capitalize on that fear, some scientific reports are deliberate hoaxes designed to reinforce the credibility of our scientific, political, or military establishments. This is a fact of life, and it should not discourage one from the study of science. It does not necessarily mean that anyone is hiding some formidable truth. If the idea that science knows nothing about certain phenomena is unacceptable to the public, why should it be more easily acceptable to professional scientists?"

— Jacques Vallee, from Passport to Magonia (p. 156)

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

— Arthur Schopenhauer

"Everything could be settled by speaking the truth. But now, people wouldn’t know the truth if you spoke it. It only upsets them. It hurts their ego. And then you are their enemy."

— Grandfather Semu Huarte

"Without courage there cannot be truth, and without truth there can be no other virtue."

— Sir Walter Scott

"Few men have imagination enough for the truth of reality."

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!!"

"If you add to the truth, you subtract from it."

— The Talmud

"All great truths began as blasphemies."

— George Bernard Shaw

"In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."

"Half a truth is often a great lie."

— Benjamin Franklin

"Knowledge is neither good nor evil. It is truth. How it is utilized, for good or evil, is the responsibility of the user."

— Anthony B. Herbert, from Military Manual of Self Defense (p. 7)

"The small truth has words that are clear; the great truth has great silence."

"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill."

— Barbara Tuchman

"The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence."

— Simone Weil, from "The Power of Words"

"For the first time ever in the history of mankind, the wilderness is safer than ‘civilization.’"

"It is alien to the Hopis to settle matters out of hand by majority vote. Such a vote leaves a dissatisfied minority, which makes them very uneasy. Their natural way of doing it is to discuss it among themselves at great length, and group by group, until public opinion as a whole has settled overwhelmingly in one direction."

"When someone stepped away from what was natural, the elders told him what was kind, what was right, what worked and what didn’t. It was the job of the elders to make sure the people were straight with the universe, their job to leave order in this world before they went on to the next. In our time, we do not have elders; we have old people who do not know any more about living that we do and whose existence is increasingly burdensome to us and to them. . . . Without a link between us and the elders, there is no longer anyone to tell us we’re on the wrong road. Nobody argues against our shallow life, nobody talks about a better time, because nobody alive now remembers a better time."

— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (pp. 11-12)

"Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years . . ."

"The great ruler speaks little

and his words are priceless

He works without self-interest

and leaves no trace

When all is finished, the people say,

‘It happened by itself’"

"Do not be negligent, even in trifling matters."

"The most dangerous words are vain and lightly uttered words, because they are the voluntary abortions of thought."

"Many little leaks may sink a ship."

— Thomas Fuller

"Don’t get caught slippin’."

"There is, among New Age people, an astonishing lack of good sense and a dangerous Pollyanna attitude toward the realities of the occult. . . . When the door to the occult is opened, light and darkness spill out together. The idea that as long as we don’t believe in evil it cannot harm us is disastrously wrong."

— Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (p. 254)

"The mundane realities of living and our failure to address them responsibly offer means of attack. We may habitually run out of money, ignore balding tires or overload the electrical wiring in our houses. We may let our teeth deteriorate or eat food that weakens instead of nourishes us. Attention to the facts of daily living and responsible care-taking in every aspect of our lives shuts the door on a multitude of ills."