Quotes We Love

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1960's Counterculture Quotes!

"The Earth is always shifting. The light is always changing. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out." - James Baldwin

"What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind." - Dhammapada

"Each kind of living being, idea, person has a fixed law of existence, according to which it develops in a way that is unchanging. Then everything becomes spontaneously as it should be . The law of life has an inner life that it must involuntarily obey." - I Ching

"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men." - Alice Walker

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mohandas Gandhi

"I have been particularly concerned with the sufferings of chickens for many years. It was the death of a chicken that finally strengthened my resole to become vegetarian. These days when I see a row of plucked chickens hanging in a meat shop, it hurts. I find it unacceptable that violence is the basis of some of our food habits." - His Holiness the Dalai Lama

"I feel that what was done in the dark will come to light. There are secrets everybody's gonna find out about." - Tupac Shakur

"Better than a thousand useless words is one single word that gives peace.

Better than a thousand useless verses is one single verse that gives peace.

Better than a hundred useless poems is one single poem that gives peace.

Better than a hundred years not considering how all things arise and pass away is oe single day of life if one considers how all things arise and pass away."
- Dhammapada, chapter 8

"What if we lived in a world where companies didn't measure their performance only in terms of revenue and profitability? What if pharmaceutical companies reported on their bottom lines, along with those familiar figures, the number of lives saved by their drugs every quarter, and food companies reported the number of children rescued from malnutrition? “What if companies issued separate stock based on social returns, and people could buy the shares of those that saved more lives than others, or sell the shares of energy companies that polluted more than their competitors? What if, by raising "social capital" and investing it in sustainable businesses without a profit motive, companies could reach into new markets, expanding their core businesses at the same time they improved lives?" - from Fortune Magazine

"Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate tenderness to their young when deprived of them; and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these quiet creatures." - Thomas de Quincey

"Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends."
- George Bernard Shaw

"Eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it." - from A River Runs Through It

"Almost anything you do will be insignificant, but it is very importantthat you do it." - Mohandas Gandhi

"We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people." - Arthur Schopenhauer

"Be not the slave of your own past . . . plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so shall you come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience, that shall explain and overlook the old." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"You're not overweight; you are starving from lack of self-esteem." - Caroline Myss

"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." - Plato

"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of us acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic." - Anaïs Nin

"Fall seven times, stand up eight."
- Japanese proverb

"I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all."
-  Laura Ingalls Wilder

"The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit.  The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are." - Marcus Aurelius

"A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle." -  Benjamin Franklin

"No matter who says what, you should accept it with a smile and do your own work." - Mother Teresa

"No healing can take place until we decide to think actively about the dark side." - Robert Bly

"Love is something you can leave behind you when you die. It's that powerful." - John Lame Deer

"Soul is our appetite, driving us to eat from the banquet of life. People filled with the hunger of soul take food from every dish before them, whether it be sweet or bitter." - Matthew Fox

"If on the journey of life a man can find a wise and intelligent friend who is good and self-controlled, let him go with that traveler, and in joy and recollection let them overcome the dangers of the journey.
  
But if on that journey of life a man cannot find a wise and intelligent friend who is good and self-controlled, let him then travel alone… for it is better to go alone on the path of life rather than to have a fool for companion."
- Dhammapada, Chapter 23

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." - Rainer Maria Rilke

"God...sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it... and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better." - Rilke

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace."
- Milan Kundera

"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." - Joseph Campbell

"Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand."
-  Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

"First it was necessary to civilize man in relation to man. Now it is necessary to civilize man in relation to nature and the animals." - Victor Hugo

"Through the passage of time we learned to love as we filled our cups and served each other again, again, and again." - on the wall at Rutabegorz Restaurant

"I'm 23 years old. I might just be my mother's child, but in all reality, I'm everybody's child. Nobody raised me; I was raised in this society."
- Tupac Shakur

"I believe that mink are raised for being turned into fur coats and if we didn't wear fur coats those little animals would never have been born. So is it better not to have been born or to have lived for a year or two to have been turned into a fur coat? I don't know."
- Barbi Benton (We desperately want to comment on this quote, but think it speaks for itself.)

"Don't live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable." - Wendy Wasserstein

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

"No government has the right to tell its citizens when or whom to love. The only queer people are those who don't love anybody." - Rita Mae Brown

"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself." - Harvey Fierstein

"There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." - Anaïs Nin

"You could move." - Abigail Van Buren, "Dear Abby"
In response to a reader who complained that a gay couple was moving in across the street, and wanted to know what he could do to improve the quality of the neighborhood.

"Many years ago when an adored dog died, a great friend, a bishop, said to me, "You must always remember that, as far as the Bible is concerned, God only threw the humans out of Paradise." - Unknown

"The bond with a true dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth will ever be." - Konrad Lorenz

"God's work isn't done by God. It's done by people."
- Ani DiFranco.

"There's no inherent reason why business cannot be ethical, socially responsible, and profitable."
- John Mackey, chairman Whole Foods Market

"In the hour of adversity be not without hope
For crystal rain falls from black clouds."
- Nizami Ganjavi

"We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine."
- H. L. Mencken

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
- Marianne Williamson

"All my life I’ve been lazy,  
hating anything solemn, finding light in
matters more congenial.
Others may study how to make a profit,
I have my single roll of scripture.
I don’t bother to fit it with a roll or case,
or trouble to carry it here or there.
Like a doctor prescribing a medicine for
each disease,
I use what remedy is at hand to save the
world.
Only when the mind is free of care
can the light of understanding shine in
every corner."
- Han-shan, whose name means cold mountain,
Chinese mystic recluse, lived sometime between the 6th to the 10th century - no one is absolutely sure.