Fridge notes

In the discussion time of my Sunday Symposium, we have a small ritual. When anyone says something worth remembering, we say, “that’s for your refrigerator door.” Everyone has a fridge door full of notes. Here are a few educational gems for your door:

1. Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you. – Jean-Paul Sartre
2. I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. – Henry Miller
3. Whenever you get there, there’s no there there. – Gertrude Stein
4. Perfect love means to love the one through whom one became unhappy. – Sören Kierkegaard
5. Take away love and our earth is a tomb. – Robert Browning
6. There is no way to peace. Peace is the way. – A.J. Muste
7. Millions of persons long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy afternoon. – Susan Ertz
8. Enlightened space, the place of unconditional love, cannot be achieved until and unless one is willing to be comfortable with paradox and confusion. – Ralph Walker
9. There is no need to struggle to be free; the absence of struggle is in itself freedom. – Chögyam Trungpa – Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism
10. Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned. – Mark Twain
11. The Delphic Oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone of all the Greeks know that I know nothing. – Socrates
12. Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me. – Sigmund Freud
13. Truth is completely spontaneous. Lies have to be taught. – R. Buckminster Fuller
14. Everyone automatically assumes that the present is the result of the past. Turn it around, and consider whether the past may not be a result of the present. The past may be streaming back from the now, like the country as seen from an airplane. – Alan Watts
15. Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us: we regard every person whose way of thinking is different from ours as a monster and a threat and by so doing turn our own selves into monsters and threats to our fellows. – Octavio Paz
16. Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. – A Course in Miracles
17. The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. – William Makepeace Thackeray
18. By your stumbling, the world is perfected. – Sri Aurobindo
19. We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. – T.S. Eliot
20. Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. – Arthur Schopenhauer
21. Thinking about interior peace destroys interior peace. The patient who constantly feels his pulse is not getting any better. – Hubert van Zeller
22. There should be less talk. A preaching point is not a meeting point. – Mother Theresa
23. If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life. – Albert Camus

In the future, for our “fridge door educational series,” I will share with you some of my all time favorite quotes on this mental virus we call “religion.”