“Living in the Moment could be the meaning of Life!” =)

Drink FRESH water and as much water as you can. Water flushes unwanted toxins from your body and keeps your brain sharp.

A daily hit of athletic-induced endorphins gives you the power to make better decisions, helps you be at peace with yourself, and offsets stress.

Do one thing a day that scares you.

Listen, listen, listen, and then ask strategic questions.

Write down your short and long-term GOALS four times a year. Two personal, two business and two health goals for the next 1, 5 and 10 years. Goal setting triggers your subconscious computer.

Life is full of setbacks. Success is determined by how you handle setbacks.

Your outlook on life is a direct reflection of how much you like yourself.

That which matters the most should never give way to that which matters the least.

Stress is related to 99% of all illness.

Jealousy works the opposite way you want it to.

The world is changing at such a rapid rate that waiting to implement changes will leave you 2 steps behind: DO IT NOW, DO IT NOW, DO IT NOW!

Friends are more important than money.

Breathe deeply and appreciate the moment. (No, really.  This very moment.) =)

Living in the moment could be the meaning of life.

Take various DotFit vitamins. You never know what small mineral can eliminate the bottleneck to everlasting health.

Don’t trust that an old age pension will be sufficient.

Visualize your eventual demise. It can have an amazing effect on how you live for the moment.

The conscious brain can only hold one thought at a time. Choose a positive thought.

Live near the ocean and inhale the pure salt air that flows over the water, Vancouver will do nicely.

Observe a plant before and after watering and relate these benefits to your body and brain.

Practice yoga so you can remain active in physical sports as you age.

Dance, sing, floss and travel.

Children are the orgasm of life.

Just like you did not know what an orgasm was before you had one, nature does not let you know how great children are until you have them.

Successful people replace the words “wish”, “should” and “try” with “I will”.

Creativity is maximized when you’re living in the moment.

Nature wants us to be mediocre because we have a greater chance to survive and reproduce. Mediocre is as close to the bottom as it is to the top, and will give you a lousy life.lululemon athletica creates components for people to live longer, healthier and more fun lives. If we can produce products to keep people active and stress-free, we believe the world will become a much better place.

Do not use cleaning chemicals on your kitchen counters. Someone will inevitably make a sandwich on your counter.

SWEAT once a day to regenerate your skin.

Communication is COMPLICATED. We are all raised in a different family with slightly different definitions of every word. An agreement is an agreement only if each party knows the conditions for satisfaction and a time is set for satisfaction to occur.

What we do to the earth we do to ourselves.

The pursuit of happiness is the source of all unhappiness.

Samurai: “To Serve with Tenacious Resolve”

Originally a verb meaning:  “to wait upon or accompany a person in the upper ranks of society” ~ and this is also true of the original term in Japanese: saburau. The terms were nominalized to mean “those who serve in close attendance to the nobility,” the pronunciation in Japanese changing to saburai.

fight club.

10 simple ways to save yourself from messing up your life

1. Stop taking so much notice of how you feel. How you feel is how you feel. It’ll pass soon. What you’re thinking is what you’re thinking. It’ll go too. Tell yourself that whatever you feel, you feel; whatever you think, you think. Since you can’t stop yourself thinking, or prevent emotions from arising in your mind, it makes no sense to be proud or ashamed of either. You didn’t cause them. Only your actions are directly under your control. They’re the only proper cause of pleasure or shame.
2. Let go of worrying. It often makes things worse. The more you think about something bad, the more likely it is to happen. When you’re hair-trigger primed to notice the first sign of trouble, you’ll surely find something close enough to convince yourself it’s come.
3. Ease up on the internal life commentary. If you want to be happy, stop telling yourself you’re miserable. People are always telling themselves how they feel, what they’re thinking, what others feel about them, what this or that event really means. Most of it’s imagination. The rest is equal parts lies and misunderstandings. You have only the most limited understanding of what others feel about you. Usually they’re no better informed on the subject; and they care about it far less than you do. You have no way of knowing what this or that event really means. Whatever you tell yourself will be make-believe.
4. Take no notice of your inner critic. Judging yourself is pointless. Judging others is half-witted. Whatever you achieve, someone else will always do better. However bad you are, others are worse. Since you can tell neither what’s best nor what’s worst, how can you place yourself correctly between them? Judging others is foolish since you cannot know all the facts, cannot create a reliable or objective scale, have no means of knowing whether your criteria match anyone else’s, and cannot have more than a limited and extremely partial view of the other person. Who cares about your opinion anyway?
5. Give up on feeling guilty. Guilt changes nothing. It may make you feel you’re accepting responsibility, but it can’t produce anything new in your life. If you feel guilty about something you’ve done, either do something to put it right or accept you screwed up and try not to do so again. Then let it go. If you’re feeling guilty about what someone else did, see a psychiatrist. That’s insane.
6. Stop being concerned what the rest of the world says about you. Nasty people can’t make you mad. Nice people can’t make you happy. Events or people are simply events or people. They can’t make you anything. You have to do that for yourself. Whatever emotions arise in you as a result of external events, they’re powerless until you pick them up and decide to act on them. Besides, most people are far too busy thinking about themselves (and worry what you are are thinking and saying about them) to be concerned about you.

7. Stop keeping score. Numbers are just numbers. They don’t have mystical powers. Because something is expressed as a number, a ratio or any other numerical pattern doesn’t mean it’s true. Plenty of lovingly calculated business indicators are irrelevant, gibberish, nonsensical, or just plain wrong. If you don’t understand it, or it’s telling you something bizarre, ignore it. There’s nothing scientific about relying on false data. Nor anything useful about charting your life by numbers that were silly in the first place.

8. Don’t be overly concerned that your life and career aren’t working out the way you planned. The closer you stick to any plan, the quicker you’ll go wrong. The world changes constantly. However carefully you analyzed the situation when you made the plan, if it’s more than a few days old, things will already be different. After a month, they’ll be very different. After a year, virtually nothing will be the same as it was when you started. Planning is only useful as a discipline to force people to think carefully about what they know and what they don’t. Once you start, throw the plan away and keep your eyes on reality.

9. Don’t let others use you to avoid being responsible for their own decisions. To hold yourself responsible for someone else’s success and happiness demeans them and proves you’ve lost the plot. It’s their life. They have to live it. You can’t do it for them; nor can you stop them from messing it up if they’re determined to do so. The job of a supervisor is to help and supervise. Only control-freaks and some others with a less serious mental disability fail to understand this.
10. Don’t worry about about your personality. { You don’t really have one.} Personality, like ego, is a concept invented by your mind. It doesn’t exist in the real world. Personality is a word for the general impression that you give through your words and actions. If your personality isn’t likeable today, don’t worry. You can always change it, so long as you allow yourself to do so. What fixes someone’s personality in one place is a determined effort on their part-usually through continually telling themselves they’re this or that kind of person and acting on what they say. If you don’t like the way you are, make yourself different. You’re the only person who’s standing in your way.

Written by Adrian Savage

“Hugs” as a form of communication:

“In a combat Zone…”

“…One MUST be combat READY.”

- LockDown Crew Lead Personnel

“Give them an experience they will never forget.”

Don’t ever let it go to the judges  scorecards.

In the cage, and in the matters of your life~ NEVER let it go to the judges for a decision.

-Dana White UFC

Unlimited Potential

Begin with the premise that ~

who you ARE is currently MUCH more than you are currently demonstrating.

Dawn the Cape.   Work the Solution from there.

Ten Things You Should Already Know By Now

1. What’s important today won’t matter tomorrow

Yeah, so you got a problem. Sleep on it, sunshine. Put it off. Most problems can be safely ignored. You’ll be amazed how often they sort themselves out.

And the gravity of any given problem is inversely proportional to the hour of the day. At three in the morning, you’ve got an insurmountable issue. After four whisky and cokes at nine in the evening, you haven’t even got an inkling of a problem.

2. Everybody else is furiously improvising, so you can too

Show me an expert and I’ll show you a charlatan. FAKE IT ‘TIL YOU MAKE IT, amigo.

21 year old lifestyle design guru? Hell yeah! Fat, unemployed life-coach? Why not? Homeopathy professional? Whatever, bring it on!

Choose your path, and then Act As If You’re Wearing A Cape.

3. Nobody thinks about you as much as you think about you

Really. They don’t. For example, I’m not thinking about you now. But I bet you are.

4. It’s OK to piss people off

But if you’re pissing everybody off, all the time, it’s time to stop being a dick.

5. Self improvement is masturbation. Or is it?

6. Nobody tells all the truth, all the time

So lower your expectations of people. When put in a spot, people fib.

We men lie about our alcohol consumption all the time.

When we’re young and say we had six beers, we probably only had three. Nowadays, if we say we only had three beers, you can be sure it was closer to six.

It doesn’t mean we don’t love you

7. Life doesn’t get better – only your perception of life improves

There was a little man with a lame left leg. He lived on the outskirts of town in a tumble-down house. He had a hole in his roof, and water would come in day and night. His lame left leg meant he couldn’t go out to work, so he survived on the charity of others, who would give him scraps of food. Sometimes he would go for two days and nights with nothing to eat. One day, the town council decided to fix his roof. The little man with the lame left leg became the happiest person you have ever seen. He was so grateful to be dry that he would smile and sing for the passersby all day long.

***

There was a healthy, beautiful woman who lived in a huge house with six servants and manicured lawns. But alas, she was permanently angry, because Jeannine, that bitch, had told her that her handbag was so last season.

8. Your family comes first, but not to the detriment of everything else

You want to go out with the girls? Tell your husband to make his own dinner. And gents, you don’t need permission for that once-a-year trip to Vegas, you just need to communicate it properly.

9. You’re wrong as often as you’re right

So don’t dwell on either.

10. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“poppies….pOppies!!!…”

“

Handbook for Life 2010

HEALTH:
1. Drink plenty of water.
2. Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like beggar.
3. Eat more foods that grow on trees and plants and eat less food that is
manufactured in plants.
4. Live with the 3 E’s — Energy, Enthusiasm and Empathy.
5. Make time to meditate.
6. (Breathe)

7. Read more books than you did in 2009.
8. Sit in silence for at least 10 minutes each day.
9. Sleep for 7 hours.
10. Take a 10-30 minute walk daily. And while you walk, smile.

PERSONALITY:

11. Comparing our lives to others is fruitless. We have no idea what their journey is about.

12. Replace negative thoughts with positive ones especially about things out of our control. Invest energy in the positive present moment.
13. Try not to over do. Understand limits.
14. Why take ourselves so seriously. No one else does.
15. Gossip drains precious energy.
16. Dream more while we are awake.
17. Envy is a waste of time. We already have all we need.
18. Forget issues of the past. Let go of our partners mistakes of the past. Focus on our present/future happiness.
19. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.

20. Make peace with our past so it won’t spoil the present.
21. No one is in charge of our happiness except us.
22. Realize that life is a school and we are here to learn. Problems are simply part of the curriculum that appear and fade away like algebra class but the lessons we learn will last a lifetime.
23. Smile and laugh more.
24. We don’t have to win arguments. It’s ok to agree to disagree.

SOCIETY:
25. Call your family often.
26. Each day give something good to others.
27. Forgive everyone for everything.
28. Spend time with people over the age of 70 and under the age of 6.
29. Try to make at least three people smile each day.
30. What other people think of you is insignificant compared to what you think of yourself.
31. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends & family will. Stay in touch.

LIFE:
32. Do the right thing!
33. Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful or joyful.
34. (Higher powers) heal everything.
35. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
36. No matter how we feel, get up, dress up, and show up.
37. The best is yet to come.
38. When we awake alive in the morning, be thankful.
39. Our Inner most is always happy. Release your “Inner Happy” on the world every day!

drama

Kurt Vonnegut explains drama
2009-09-01

I was at a Kurt Vonnegut talk in New York a few years ago. Talking about writing, life, and everything.

He explained why people have such a need for drama in their life.

He said, “People have been hearing fantastic stories since time began. The problem is, they think life is supposed to be like the stories. Let’s look at a few examples.”

He drew an empty grid on the board, like this:

Time moves from left to right. Happiness from bottom to top.

He said, “Let’s look at a very common story arc. The story of Cinderella.”

It starts with her awful life with evil stepsisters, scrubbing the fireplace. Then she get an invitation to the ball! Things look up. Then the fairy godmother makes her a dress and a coach. Even better! Then she goes to the ball, and dances with the prince! This is great! But then it’s midnight. She has to go. Oh no. Sadness. Back to her humdrum life scrubbing the fireplace. But it’s not as bad as before, because she’s had this encouraging experience. Then, the prince finds her, and the happiness factor is off the chart! Happily ever after.

“People LOVE that story! This story arc has been written a thousand times in a thousand tales. And because of it, people think their lives are supposed to be like this.”

He wiped the board clean and said, “Now let’s look at another popular story arc: the disaster.”

It’s an ordinary day in an ordinary town. But something horrible happens! A child falls down a well! The whole town gathers to save her. Old grudges surface, but are belittled in the light of this tragedy. Rifts are bonded as people work together. The child is saved, and all is well. But notice it’s a little better than it was before, now that this incident has brought them all closer together.

“People LOVE that story! This story arc has been written a thousand times in a thousand tales. And because of it, people think their lives are supposed to be like this.”

But the problem is, life is really like this…

Our lives drifts along with normal things happening. Some ups, some downs, but nothing to go down in history about. Nothing so fantastic or terrible that it’ll be told for a thousand years.

“But because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.”

That’s why people invent fights. That’s why we’re drawn to sports. That’s why we act like everything that happens to us is such a big deal.

We’re trying to make our life into a fairy tale.

© 2009 Derek Sivers

“Trust me…”

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of right about now… 

Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Sing.

Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.

Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.

Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents. You never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They’re your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you’ll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.

Don’t mess too much with your hair or by the time you’re 40 it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen.

“love me a little while…”

WOODY~isms

so there ~

I don’t know what to say to you or how I’m supposed to say it. It’s so awkward not being able to talk to you like we were able to do before. I guess I wanted to start off with saying I’m sorry for they way things turned out. I wanted to be everything to you. And I wanted you to be the same for me. I guess we expected to much from each other. I know I wasn’t always there for you. I wanted to be though. It was so hard for me to see you with him when you were supposed to be with me. I completely broke. I thought I was what you wanted and I couldn’t believe you would hurt me. I didn’t think you were capable of such a thing. And even though it’s been several months, it still kills me to look at you, and think of us and what we could’ve built together… I just want to come over and hold _u forever… but I now that that is so far fetched and crazy. I sometimes think of what it would have been like if I had been there. I wonder if we would still be together. But then I think maybe it was ill-fated from the start. You know I realize we weren’t meant to be. That we we’re two very different people who thought they new each other but didn’t know each other at all. It’s true though… what people say, you never forget your first love; your “soul-mate”… I’m reminded of that. Because, you were and still are my greatest love. my soulmate… And I’m just so sorry that I wasn’t the same to you.

-J

8 harsh truths that will transform your Life:

8 Harsh Truths that Will Transform Your Life

They say life is what we make of it. By the end of this post, I hope to have helped you decide whether that statement is true or not.

There is no doubt that life has its ups and downs. However, how we deal with them can sometimes make all the difference. Today I want to share eight harsh truths that I’ve come to learn from life. There’s also a message in each that I think we can all learn from, and when applied, will improve our lives infinitely.

Some of these lessons may be old-hat for you. If so, look for ways to refine the idea to ensure your getting the most out of it. On the other hand, you may completely disagree with an idea or two and that’s great! Let us know your thoughts so we can all learn from each other.

1. Friends Come and Go
   When I was in high school, I always imagined spending most of my life with the same people. Then when I realized I had to move to college, that all changed. Once again, I made some close college friends but left them all behind when I moved from the UK to South Africa.

   Friends will always come and go in your life; even though I’m back in the UK now, all my friends are in university around the country and not exactly in meeting distance. It can be a hard thing to accept, but many of the friends you spend time with now, might not be around in the next few years.

   Important Lesson: There are an abundance of amazing people out there for you to meet and build relationships with. If you don’t have many friends, don’t stress, there are literally billions of friendship possibilities.

2. You Won’t Always Get What You Want
   I remember one Christmas when the only thing I had asked for was some second hand turntables for DJ’ing. I didn’t ask for anything else so I was pretty sure I would get them. However, they didn’t come and I ended up having to save for 10 months on my own in order to purchase them.

   You won’t always get what you want in life: people are going to be late, people will let you down, items you want won’t always be available.

   Important Lesson: Don’t look for happiness in material possessions and if things don’t go your way, learn to accept them. Life’s too short to stay miserable.

3. Many People Will Love You, but Many Will Not
   Whether you are a celebrity, a charity worker or just a normal guy, there are going to be people that love you and what you do, but there’s also going to be plenty people that don’t like you. There are many possible reasons such as jealousy, similarities to them, or just not being someone’s ‘type’.

   Important Lesson: Not everyone is always going to like you, and that’s fine. If people want to spend time talking about you then that is their problem. You are perfect as you are. You shouldn’t need everyone to like you to have some form of self-esteem.

4. Nobody Can Transform Your Life Like You Can
   Wouldn’t it be lovely if we didn’t have to go up on stage, but we could just read a paragraph of a blog post and become a perfect public speaker? Or, wouldn’t it be nice if our friends could do daring things, and we would benefit from them as well?

   The support and help of others can only take you so far, you’re going to have to do your own thing to make big changes in your life situation.

   Important Lesson: Do things for yourself and learn to stand on your own two feet. People you rely on won’t be around forever, and you don’t want to have to use others as a crutch to get anywhere in life.

5. You Are Going to Fail
   I built more than 7 websites before I created one that actually started making me any money. I even put hundreds of hours into my own company that I actually closed down last month. Whether it is exams, projects, companies, or even the odd pub quiz, there are times when you will fail to meet your goals.

   As the saying goes – “Only those who are asleep make no mistakes”.

   Important Lesson: You can learn a lot from others, but it is your own failures that are going to teach you the most valuable lessons in life. Learn from your failures, embrace them, and use them to drive you on to success.

6. Rain Will Sometimes Cancel Play
   On some occasions when you have your shorts on and you’re ready for the beach, it’s going to rain. Or, when you get to that first hole and you’re ready to tee off – the clouds will open. Things aren’t always going to go how you would like them to.

   Important Lesson: Don’t stress about the things that you can’t control. Learn to live with things that happen. You can’t change the past, but you can change how you react to things.

7. There May Be No Tomorrow
   At least, not for you anyway. We never know what is around the corner, a car crash, a heart attack; heck…even the end of the world is possible. Let’s face it, although we would all like to live till we are 70 years old, that’s certainly not always the case. There will be one day that is our last.

   Important Lesson: Make the most of each day. Make sure the people you care about actually know it, don’t worry about little matters, just make sure you spend time doing the things you love.

8. Someone Else Will Always Have More
   Whether it is money, partners, friends or even blog subscribers, there will always be areas where other people have more than you. That isn’t to say you can’t become abundant in whatever you want (i.e. someone always had more money than Warren Buffett until 2008 when he was noted to be the richest man in the world).

   The wanting of more actually holds a very important lesson…

   Important Lesson: Just because someone has ‘more’, that doesn’t mean they are happy. Read the biography of any celebrity and they will tell you they enjoy their process of earning money, rather than what money can do to make them happy. In other words, focus on what you love, not what the thing you love can get you.

BONUS: Linking all the lessons here together is actually quite simple, and I can share the majority of what you need to know to enjoy life in a few simple bullet points:

• Live life for the moment
• Accept what is, even if things don’t go your way
• Happiness is here, right now if you stop resisting and start accepting

I hope you all enjoyed my slightly unique take on the topic of improving your life. I would love to hear some harsh (but necessary) truths in the comments below!

“you’ve been taught….”

my “bretty” ;)

every thing.

Life instructions:

~ Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully ~

~ Memorize your favorite poem ~

~ Don’t believe all you hear, spend all you have or sleep all you want ~

~ When you say, “I love you”, mean it ~

~ When you say, “I’m sorry”, look the person in the eye ~

~ Be engaged at least six months before you get married ~

~ Believe in love at first sight ~

~ Never laugh at anyone’s dreams ~

~ Love deeply and passionately. You might get hurt but it’s the only way to live life completely ~

~ In disagreements, fight fairly. No name calling ~

~ Don’t judge people by their relatives. “NO KIDDING” ~

~ Talk slow but think quick ~

~ When someone asks you a question you don’t want to answer, smile and ask, “Why do you want to know?” ~

~ Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk ~

~ Call your mom ~

~ Say “bless you” when you hear someone sneeze ~

~ When you lose, don’t lose the lesson ~

~ Remember the three R’s: Respect for self; Respect for others; Responsibility for all your actions ~

~ Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship ~

~ When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it ~

~ Smile when picking up the phone. The caller will hear it in your voice ~

~ Marry a man/woman you love to talk to. As you get older, his/her conversational skills
will be as important as any other ~

~ Spend some time alone ~

~ Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values ~

~ Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer ~

~ Read more books and watch less TV ~

~ Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll get to enjoy it a second time ~

~ Trust in God but lock your car ~

~ A loving atmosphere in your home is so important. Do all you can to create a tranquil harmonious home ~

~ In disagreements with loved ones, deal with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past ~

~ Read between the lines ~

~ Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality ~

~ Be gentle with the earth ~

~ Pray. There’s immeasurable power in it ~

~ Never interrupt when you are being flattered ~

~ Mind your own business ~

~ Don’t trust a man/woman who doesn’t close his/her eyes when you kiss them ~

~ Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before ~

~ If you make a lot of money, put it to use helping others while you are living. That is wealth’s greatest satisfaction ~

~ Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a stroke of luck ~

~ Learn the rules then break some ~

~ Remember that the best relationship is one where your love for each other is greater than your need for each other ~

~ Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it ~

~ Remember that your character is your destiny ~

~ Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon

who deserves your love & respect…?

Aldous Huxley – Select Quotes

That we do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
~ in Collected Essays

Under favorable conditions, practically everybody can be converted to practically anything.
~ in Brave New World Revisited

Chastity–the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
~ in Eyeless in Gaza

Death … It’s the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
~ in Eyeless in Gaza

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
~ in Music at Night

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
~ in Proper Studies

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
~ in Texts and Pretexts

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
~ in Vedanta for the Western World

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.

At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political ideas.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.

There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.

A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

Dream in a pragmatic way.

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.

Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.

I can sympathize with people’s pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.

I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.’

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.

Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.

Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.

Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.

People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.

Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love – almost as violent and much more mischievous.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

The proper study of mankind is books.

The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

There isn’t any formula or method. You learn to love by loving – by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.

Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.

We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.

We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.

What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.

What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes – ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It’s one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eying the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can’t be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.

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Bibliography

The Burning Wheel (1916)
Jonah (1917)
The Defeat of Youth (1918)
Leda (1920)
Limbo (1920)
Crome Yellow (1921)
Mortal Coils (1922)
Antic Hay (1923)
On the Margin (1923)
Little Mexican / Young Archimedes (1924)
Those Barren Leaves (1925)
Along The Road (1925)
Essays New and Old (1926)
Two or Three Graces (1926)
Proper Studies (1927)
Jesting Pilate (1926)
Point Counter Point (1928)
Do What You Will (1929)
Arabia Infelix (1929)
Brief Candles (1930)
Vulgarity in Literature (1930)
The Cicadas (1931)
Music at Night (1931)
Brave New World (1932)
Texts and Pretexts (1932)
Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934)
Eyeless in Gaza (1936)
The Olive Tree (1936)
Ends and Means (1937)
Jacob’s Hands; A Fable
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939)
Words and their Meanings (1940)
Grey Eminence (1941)
The Art of Seeing (1942)
Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
The Perennial Philosophy (1945)
Science, Liberty and Peace (1946)
Ape and Essence (1948)
Themes and Variations (1950)
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1952)
The Devils of Loudun (1953)
The Doors of Perception (1954)
The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
Heaven and Hell (1956)
Adonis and the Alphabet (1956)
Collected Short Stories (1957)
Collected Essays (1958)
Brave New World Revisited (1958)
Island (1962)
Literature and Science (1963)
The Crows of Pearblossom (1967)
The Travails and Tribulations of Geoffrey Peacock (1967)
Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1977)
The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara, 1959 (1977)
First Philosopher’s Song
Mortal Coils – A Play
The World of Light
The Discovery, Adapted from Francis Sheridan
Selected Letters (2007)

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