Apropos

hink that almost every word we speak to anyone is a way of trying to 
explain to them who we are, and almost always we fail, and that is why I 
would rather not try. It is a great wonder to be able to speak a single 
work, your name, and be believed. - Theodore Sturgeon 
 

The days are gone when you could be only an intellectual, you could be only 
a soldier or a hero, you could be only a merchant or only a worker... to 
seek to perfect myself only in that line in which I am specially gifted is 
called specialisation. It is out of tune, out of temper with the times. - 
M.P. Pandit, 1974 

The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent of 
its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life. 
- Barry Lopez 
 

othing has ever so moved me as this realisation that a man could so 
utterly forget time and place and the world. In that hour I grasped the 
secret of all art and of all earthly achievement-concentration, the 
rallying of all one's forces for accomplishment of one's task, large or 
small; capacity to direct one's will, so often dissipated and scattered, 
upon one thing. - Stefan Zweig, after visiting Rodin 
 

Most of us are only intermittently aware, even in youth, and the occasions 
on which adults see and feel and hear with every sense alert become rarer 
and rarer with the passage of years. - Dorothea Brande 
 

It is a splendid thing to live in the environment of great students... they 
stir the waters. - Robert Henri 
 

ow glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! To behold this alone 
is worth the pain of any excursion a thousand times over. The highest peaks 
burned like islands in a sea of liquid shade. Then the lower peaks and 
spines caught the glow, and long lances of light, streaming through many a 
notch and pass, fell thick on the frozen meadows. - John Muir 
 

There are moments when something new has entered into us, a something 
unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us 
withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in 
the midst of it and is silent. - Rainer Maria Rilke 
 

Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a 
distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the 
fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and 
the slavery of Home, one feels once more happy. The blood flows with the 
fast circulation of childhood... A journey, in fact, appeals to 
Imagination, to Memory, to Hope, -the three sister graces of our moral 
being. - Sir Richard Francis Burton, 1856 
 

This is not a yoga in which abnormality of any kind, even if it be an 
exalted abnormality, can be admitted as a way to self-fulfillment, or 
spiritual realisation...the experiencing consciousness must preserve a calm 
balance, an unfailing clarity and order in its observation, a sort of 
sublimated commonsense, an unfailing power of self-criticism, right 
discrimination, coordination and firm vision of things; a sane grasp on 
facts and a high spiritualized positivism must always be there. - Sri 
Aurobindo 

What happened had to have happened.  But it could have been much better. - 
Sri Aurobindo