Quote of the Day

Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.
:: Plato

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farm house near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely; dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

:: Robert Frost

Quote of the Day

I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
:: Henry David Thoreau

The Moron

See the happy moron,
He doesn't give a damn!
I wish I were a moron -
My God! Perhaps I am!
:: Anonymous

Who is John Galt?

The book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is approaching its fiftieth anniversary, yet it is still timeless and as pertinent to our age as ever. I wasn't sure how popular or well-known this book was to the general public. Perhaps it should have been no surprise to see it ranked Number One in Random House's list of 100 Best Novels

When I read this as a college student thirty years ago it made a great impression on me. Of all the books which I have read in my life, only a few have caused me to change my whole world view, such as Relativity by Albert Einstein, or The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Casteneda. Atlas Shrugged would have to be included in this small collection of very influential books.

Fans of the book will be happy to hear that a movie is in the works with Angelina Jolie cast as the lead. Filming is scheduled to begin sometime at the end of 2008.

Quote of the Day

Information becomes fragmented, knowledge does not. What causes fragmentation in information is scholasticism.
:: Ramitini

Quote of the Day

If they are far down, it is because you are high up.
:: G.I. Gurdjieff

The conditions of a solitary bird are five:
The first, that it flies to the highest point;
the second, that it does not suffer for company,
not even of its own kind;
the third, that it aims its beak to the skies;
the fourth, that it does not have a definite color;
the fifth, that it sings very softly.
:: San Juan de la Cruz

New Screen Savers

Some screen savers have been added to the Modern Art II catgegory.

Quote of the Day

We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty.
:: Winston Churchill

Quote of the Day

Truth - She has confused all the learned of Islam, Everyone who has studied the psalms, Every Jewish Rabbi, Every Christian Priest.
:: Ibn El-Arabi

The Hanging Man

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid:
A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.
If he were I, he would do what I did.

:: Sylvia Plath

Quote of the Day

Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects in the phenomenal world.
:: William James

The Teachings of Don Juan

Nothing being more important than anything else, a warrior chooses any act, and acts it out as if it mattered to him. His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn't, so when he fulfills his acts, he retreats in peace, and whether his acts were good or bad, or worked or didn't, is in no way part of his concern.
:: Carlos Casteneda

Quote of the Day

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

Black Stone Lying on a White Stone

I will die in Paris, on a rainy day,
on some day I can already remember.
I will die in Paris - and I don't step aside -
perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn.

It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down
these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on
wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself
with all the road ahead of me, alone.

Cesar Vallejo is dead. Everyone beat him,
although he never does anything to them;
they beat him hard with a stick and hard also

with a rope. These are the witnesses:
the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms,
the solitude, and the rain, and the roads . . .

:: Cesar Vallejo

Quote of the Day

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
:: Charles Mingus

The Teachings of Don Juan

A warrior chooses a path with heart, any path with heart, and follows it; and then he rejoices and laughs. He knows because he sees that his life will be over altogether too soon. He sees that nothing is more important than anything else.
:: Carlos Casteneda

Quote of the Day

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.
:: Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Teachings of Don Juan

Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy, and vain. To be a warrior one needs to be light and fluid.
:: Carlos Casteneda

Deep in the sea are riches beyond compare. But if you seek safety, it is on the shore.
:: Ibn El-Arabi

The Courage of Shutting Up

The courage of the shut mouth, in spite of artillery!
The line pink and quiet, a worm, basking.
There are black disks behind it, the disks of outrage,
And the outrage of a sky, the lined brain of it.
The disks revolve, they ask to be heard -

Loaded, as they are, with the accounts of bastardies.
Bastardies, usages, desertions and doubleness,
The needle journeying in its groove,
Silver beast between two dark canyons,
A great surgeon, now a tattooist,

Tattooing over and over the same blue grievances,
The snakes, the babies, the tits
On mermaids and two-legged dreamgirls.
The surgeon is quiet, he does not speak.
He has seen too much death, his hands are full of it.

So the disks of the brain revolve, like the muzzles of cannon.
Then there is that antique billhook, the tongue,
Indefatigable, purple. Must it be cut out?
It has nine tails, it is dangerous.
And the noise it flays from the air, once it gets going!

No, the tongue, too, has been put by,
Hung up in the library with the engravings of Rangoon
And the fox heads, the otter heads, the heads of dead rabbits.
It is a marvelous object -
The things it has pierced in its time.

But how about the eyes, the eyes, the eyes?
Mirrors can kill and talk, they are terrible rooms
In which a torture goes on one can only watch.
The face that lived in this mirror is the face of a dead man.
Do not worry about the eyes -

They may be white and shy, they are no stool pigeons,
Their death rays folded like flags
Of a country no longer heard of,
An obstinate independency
Insolvent among the mountains.

:: Sylvia Plath

More screensavers have been loaded in the Impressionists Fine Arts category, including Van Gogh, Renoir, and Cezanne. Go on, have a look, and keep checking back for more new screensavers.

To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
:: Voltaire

I have loaded more screensavers in the Asian Art category. Have a look, there's more to come.

Always do what you are afraid to do.
:: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Oh, what blind joy
What hunger to use up
the air that we breathe,
the mouth, the eye, the hand.
What biting itch
to spend absolutely all of ourselves
in one single burst of laughter.
Oh, this impudent, insulting death
that assassinates us from afar,
over the pleasure that we take in dying

for a cup of tea ...

for a faint caress.

:: Josè Gorostiza

Study without thought is vain; thought without study is perilous.
:: Confucius

We are the night ocean filled
with glints of light. We are the
space
between the fish and the moon,
while we sit here together.
:: Rumi

New Screen Savers

A new category of Asian Art has been added to the Screensavers site. Since this is the most popular section of my site, more screensavers will be added in the near future.

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.
:: Friedrich Nietzsche

The Teachings of Don Juan

To be angry at people means that one considers their acts to be important. It is imperative to cease to feel that way. The acts of men cannot be important enough to offset our only viable alternative: our unchangeable encounter with infinity.
:: Carlos Casteneda

Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
:: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tao Teh Ching

It lies in the nature of Grand Virture
To follow the Tao and the Tao alone.
Now what is the Tao? It is something elusive and evasive.
Evasive and elusive!
And yet It contains within Itself a Form.
Elusive and evasive!
And yet It contains within Itself a Substance.
Shadowy and dim!
And yet It contains within Itself a Core of Vitality.
The Core of Vitality is very real,
It contains within Itself an unfailing Sincerity.
Throughout the ages Its Name has been preserved
In order to recall the Beginning of all things.
How do I know the ways of all things at the Beginning?
By what is within me.
:: Lao Tzu