EMPOWERING QUOTES

Short Empowering Quotes

You are but the product of your thoughts;
What you think, you become.

यत् भावं तत् भवति
yath bhavam tath bhavati

You shall be,
What you determine to be.

What is the process?
Start believing in yourself.
A musician must make music,
an artist must paint,
a poet must write;
What you can be, you must be.

Begin doing what you want to do NOW.
Remember, We are not living in eternity;
we have only this moment,
sparkling like a star in our hand
and melting like a snowflake.

Cultivate the 'Beginner's Mind';
ask yourself:
How can I be a beginner in each moment --
even in situations where I am doing
what I have done before many times?
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We do not, what we ought,
What we ought not, we do;
And lean upon the thought
That chance will bring us through.
But our own acts, for good or ill,
are mightier power
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The will is free.
Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful.
The seeds of god-like power are in us still;
Gods are we,Bards, saints, heroes,if we will !
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The mark of your ignorance
Is the depth of your belief
in injustice and tragedy.
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world,
The master calls a butterfly.
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No one can make you feel inferior
without your consent.
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Everybody exists.
It is only the few who live.
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The past should be a springboard,
not a hammock.
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In the confrontation
between the stream and the rock,
the stream always wins,
not through strength,
but through perseverance.
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There is no such thing as a problem
without a gift for you in its hands.
You seek problems
because you need their gifts.

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"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear
--not absence of fear." -- Mark Twain

"A man with outward courage dares to die,
one with inward courage dares to live." Lao-tzu

The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days

Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness

History is made by warfare, greed, lust for power, hatred, and xenophobia (with some other, more admirable motives thrown in here and there). We therefore often assume that these obviously human traits define our essential nature. How often have we been told that "man" is, by nature, aggressive and selfishly acquisitive?

What do we see on any ordinary day on the streets or in the homes of any American city -- even in the subways of New York? Thousands of tiny and insignificant acts of kindness and consideration. We step aside to let someone pass, smile at a child, chat aimlessly with an acquaintance or even with a stranger.......Many of us have the impression that daily life is an unending series of unpleasantness ......but think about it seriously for a moment. Such levels of nastiness cannot possibly be sustained. Society would devolve to anarchy in an instant if half our overtures to another human being were met with a pinch in the nose

Why then do most of us have the impression that people are so aggressive, and intrinsically so? The answer, I think, lies in the asymmetry of effects -- the truly tragic side of human existence. Unfortunately, one incident of violence can undo ten thousand acts of kindness, and we easily forget the predominance of kindness over aggression by confusing effect with frequency. One racially motivated beating can wipe out years of patient education for respect and toleration in a school or community. One murder can convert a friendly town, replete with trust, into a nexus of fear with people behind barred doors, suspicious of everyone and afraid to go out at night. Kindness is so fragile, so easy to efface; violence is so powerful.

This crushing and tragic asymmetry of kindness and violence is infinitely magnified when we consider the causes of history in the large. One book burning in the library of Alexandria can wipe out the accumulated wisdom of antiquity. One supposed insult, one crazed act of assassination, can undo decades of patient diplomacy, cultural exchanges,peace corps, pen pals -- small acts of kindness involving millions of citizens -- and bring two nations to a war that no one wants, but that kills millions and irrevocably changes the paths of history.

The alternative view might grant that stability must rule at nearly all moments and that much rarer events make history. But perhaps this stability arises by predominant behaviors of geniality only in relatively free and democratic societies. Perhaps the stability of most cultures has been achieved by the same `dark' forces that make history when they break out of balance -- fear, aggression, terror, domination of rich over poor, men over women, adults over children, and armed over defenseless. I allow that these forces have often kept balances, but still strongly assert that we fail to count the ten thousand ordinary acts of non-aggression -- done if only because people know their places and do not usually challenge the sources of order -- that overwhelm each overt show of strength even in societies structured by dominationTo base daily stability on anything other than our natural geniality requires a perverted social structure explicitly dedicated to breaking the human soul -- the Auschwitz model, if you will.........Obviously, both kindness and violence lie within the bounds of our nature because we perpetuate both, in spades. I only advance a structural claim that social stability rules nearly all the time and must be based on an overwhelmingly predominant (but tragically ignored) frequency of genial acts, and that geniality is therefore our usual and preferred response nearly all the time.

This is not an essay about optimism; it is an essay about tragedy. If I felt that humans were nasty by nature, I would just say, the hell with it. We get what we deserve, or what evolution left us as a legacy. But the center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days. Nothing can be more tragic than that this Everest of geniality stands upside down on its pointed summit and can be toppled so easily by rare events contrary to our everyday nature--and that these rare events make our history. In some sense, we do not get what we deserve.

The solution to our woes lies not in overcoming our `nature' but in fracturing the `great asymmetry', and allowing our ordinary propensities to direct our lives. But how can we put the commonplace into the driver's seat of history?


Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was a prominent American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science and taught in Harvard University.


(The article was published in "Natural History" magazine)

Solar Eclipse - 1 August 2008

Very good pictures of the total solar eclipse can be viewed at:
http://www.space.com/spacewatch/080801-solar-eclipse-rao.html

Two pictures below:

As the sun's "diamond ring" appears, the total phase of the Aug. 1, 2008 solar eclipse is about to commence. Note the Moon's dark shadow on the lower right beginning to encroach on the cloud deck below.

A total solar eclipse is seen in Jiuquan, in China's western Gansu province Friday Aug. 1, 2008.

Below- Extract from Space.com. http://www.space.com/spacewatch/080801-solar-eclipse-rao.html ABOARD A JET ABOVE THE ARCTIC OCEAN – A total of 147 observers from around the world had a perfect view of this morning's total eclipse of the sun, thanks to an 2,189-mile airlift to a grandstand seat 36,000-feet above the Arctic Ocean at a point between the uninhabited northern coast of Greenland and the Norwegian island group of Svalbard.The contingent of eclipse watchers were onboard an LTU Airbus A330-200 long-range jet, racing the moon's shadow like paparazzi scrambling alongside a celebrity's passing automobile. The aircraft's 555-mile-per-hour speed (mach 0.85) provided 175-seconds of total eclipse for the passengers to take pictures and record other data. In contrast, persons on a stationary ship on the Arctic sea below would have seen – provided no clouds blocked the view – the moon's 139-mile wide shadow speed past them at 2,740 mph, providing a noticeably shorter total eclipse lasting 132 seconds.Unique observing location
No planetarium in the world could have produced so impressive a natural spectacle as the sun and moon did in the cobalt-blue heavens; although the sight lasted less than 3 minutes, the fantastically beautiful skyscape more than repaid the participants, many of whom were already up before dawn to ready themselves for a round-trip flight of 12 hours. 

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The Dual Citizenship - for all.

Illness is the night-side of life,
a more onerous citizenship.

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship,
in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

Although we all prefer to use only the good passport,
sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell,
to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

************************************* - Susan Sontag