If you bring your sexual impulses to your creative work... you'll be working from deep in the genetic code, down where life wants to make new life and feel good in the process.

A time comes, after years in the trenches, when the artist begins to fathom what his career has looked like so far and what it will look like if he continues as he's proceeded.

I had to get rid of any idea of hell or any idea of the afterlife. That's what held me, kept me down. So now I just have nothing but contempt for the institution of the church.

I was unloading sides of beef down on the docks when I decided enough was enough. By then, I'd done a lot of reading on my own, so I persuaded New York University to enroll me.

You are asked to keep a ledger - a small notebook will do - of money in and money out. Counting brings clarity, and clarity is one of the first and finest fruits of prosperity.

Setting skepticism aside, even briefly, can make for very interesting explorations. It is not necessary that we change any of our beliefs. It is necessary that we examine them.

Ignoring the mind is a beautiful sadhana. This is what many of the sages did. They ignored the mind out of existence. It loses its influence and its potency when it is ignored.

One of the most startling discoveries of my career was when I realized that the strongest women in the world are not lesbians but heterosexual women, who know how to handle men.

Those born blind cannot see; similarly blind are those in the grip of lust. Proud men have no perception of evil; and those bent on acquiring riches see no sin in their actions.

NASA was going to pick a public school teacher to go into space, observe and make a journal about the space flight, and I am a teacher who always dreamed of going up into space.

I ran away. I kept running away. Almost once a week, I'd run away from those schools. They'd catch me. They'd bring me back to the school, beat me. And it was - it was terrible.

Don't wait for a better world. Start now to create a world of harmony and peace. It is up to you, and it always has been. You may even find the solution at the end of your fork.

Women's studies is a comfy, chummy morass of unchallenged groupthink . It is, with rare exception, totally unscholarly. Academic feminists have silenced men and dissenting women.

Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.

Except for naval and air exercises, our military should be stationed on American soil, where service men and women can lead normal lives in close proximity to family and friends.

A ruler wishing to win shold not trust a cpterued enemy even if he may be extending had to be friend. Because deep rooted enemity, however, concealed, will ruerely come to light.

When we speak of God or achieving union with God, we are often merely trying to put that great thing into a small container. One cannot drive a camel through the eye of a needle.

I can remember in early elementary school when the Russians launched the first satellite. There was still so much unknown about space. People thought Mars was probably populated.

With constant practice, one can improve his physical body and mental attitude rapidly, thereby igniting the higher motives of making one’s self useful to himself and all mankind.

It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen

I have learned, as a rule of thumb, never to ask whether you can do something. Say, instead, that you are doing it. Then fasten your seat belt. The most remarkable things follow.

There will be many times when we won't look good-to ourselves or anyone else. We need to stop demanding that we do. It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time.

Our modern ideas of 'functioning' through things are really quite inhuman. We have this idea that no matter what is going on we still have to color between the lines, act normal.

It would have been disastrous for Zambia if we had gone multi-party because these parties would have been used by those opposed to Zambia's participation in the freedom struggle.

Male mastery in marriage is a social illusion, nurtured by women exhorting their creations to play and walk. At the emotional heart of every marriage is a pietà of mother and son.

Lately, I've been doing a lot of tuning in and impatiently tuning out. As a longtime fan of talk radio, I don't think this bodes well for the long-term broad appeal of the medium.

While artists fervently believe that the art marketplace was invented by the devil and remains in his henchman's hands, they have no choice but to carry long spoons and sup there.

Creativity is our true nature; blocks are an unnatural thwarting of a process at once as normal and as miraculous as the blossoming of a flower at the end of a slender green stem.

I bless the wisdom of my loving heart. Love is a form of listening. I listen with a loving heart. I listen to the love within my heart and I hear the love in the hearts of others.

My mother would have enjoyed the idea that her name was being used to build bridges. She cared a great deal and was very thoughtful and passionate about education and young women.

I think a lot about our globalized world, our global interconnectedness, and it really saddens me when I see people 'othering,' when I see people who are willing to live narrowly.

I want my kids to know that they're just as good and just as American as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or Dr. Martin Luther King. My worst fear is they will become ordinary.

Greek pederasty honored the erotic magnetism of male adolescence in a way that today brings police to the door. Children are more conscious and perverse than parents like to think.

Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough - that we should try again.

Wherever you are is always the right place. There is never a need to fix anything, to hitch up the bootstraps of the soul and start at some higher place. Start right where you are.

If you want to know if someone is a "spiritual being" ask yourself, "Is he or she breathing?" If the answer is yes, then you know that you are in the presence of a spiritual being.

You cannot drive the car if you do not have a driver's license. You cannot do brain surgery if you are not a brain surgeon. You cannot even do a massage if you don't have a license.

In my book I specifically discussed the structural nature of injustice and offered Nine Touchstones of Goddess ethics as an alternative to the Ten Commandments of Biblical religion.

Let not a single day pass without your learning a verse, half a verse, or a fourth of it, or even one letter of it; nor without attending to charity, study and other pious activity.

An artist paints, dances, draws, writes, designs, or acts at the expanding edge of consciousness. We press into the unknown rather than the known. This makes life lovely and lively.

The love of money is the source of an enormous amount of good; the fact that the good is a by-product of the selfish pursuit of riches has nothing to do with its indisputable value.

I think we could benefit from world history that is specifically taught in a multi-faceted fashion that allows for an understanding that perspectives on truth can be very different.

All men even, I have written, Jesus Christ began as flecks of tissue inside a woman's womb. Every boy must stagger out of the shadow of a mother goddess, whom he never fully escapes.

What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear. [...] Walter Pater is to call her a 'vampire,' coasting through history on her secret tasks.

I've always felt that the obligation of teachers is to have a huge, broad overview and to provide a foundation course to the students. The long view of history is absolutely crucial.

Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected; they must be replaced. Where there is no replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures at times of crisis, bafflement, or defeat.

The thinking mind is what is busy. You have to stay in your heart. You have to be in your heart. Be in your heart. The rest is up here in your head where you are doing, doing, doing.

Inspiration pushes me out of my tight intellectual comfort zone and into humility, the wonderous state of not knowing. From this place of zero, limitless possibilities seem to arise.

Minerva save us from the cloying syrup of coercive compassion! What feminism does not need, it seems to me, is an endless recycling of Doris Day Fifties clichés about noble womanhood.

The post-war "publish or perish" tyranny must end. The profession has become obsessed with quantity rather than quality. [...] One brilliant article should outweigh one mediocre book.

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