Zen Pencils by Gavin Aung Than for June 06, 2022
Transcript:
What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object, made from a tree with flexible parts, on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head. Directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions. Binding together people who never knew each other. Citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. -Carl Sargan
“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”
“Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” Lao Tzu
“Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.”
“Believe you can and you’re halfway there.”
“Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” Theodore Roosevelt
“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.”
“I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.” Marcus Aurelius
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”
“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” William Shakespeare
“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”
“We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.”
“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.” Helen Keller