Summer

Claude Monet – The Luncheon

Then followed that beautiful season…Summer….
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape
Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Summer afternoon—summer afternoon;
to me those have always been
the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Henry James

Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.
Sam Keen

Rest is not idleness,
and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day
listening to the murmur of water,
or watching the clouds float across the sky,
is hardly a waste of time.
John Lubbock

I drifted into a summer-nap under the hot shade of July,
serenaded by a cicadae lullaby,
to drowsy-warm dreams of distant thunder.
Terri Guillemets

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Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci  – Vitruvian Man, 1487

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt,
and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind:
Study the science of art.
Study the art of science.
Develop your senses – especially learn how to see.
Realize that everything connects to everything else.

One has no right to love or hate anything if one
has not acquired a thorough knowledge of its nature.
Great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object,
and if you know it but little
you will be able to love it only a little or not at all.

Once you have tasted flight,
you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward,
for there you have been,
and there you will always long to return.

An average human
looks without seeing, listens without hearing,
touches without feeling, eats without tasting,
moves without physical awareness,
inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance,
and talks without thinking.

Leonardo da Vinci

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Love 2

Hendrick Avercamp – Winter Landscape with Skaters

Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody,
I think that is a much greater hunger,
a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat.
Mother Teresa

When people love each other, they are content with very little.
When we have light and joy in our hearts, we don’t need material wealth.
The most loving communities are often the poorest.
If our own life is luxurious and wasteful, we can’t approach poor people.
If we love people, we want to identify with them and share with them.
Jean Vanier

Every child, every person needs to know that they are a source of joy;
every child, every person, needs to be celebrated.
Only when all of our weaknesses are accepted as part of our humanity
can our negative, broken self-images be transformed.”
Jean Vanier

To love someone is to show to them their beauty,
their worth and their importance.”
Jean Vanier

A community is only being created when its members accept that they are not going to achieve great things, that they are not going to be heroes, but simply live each day with new hope, like children, in wonderment as the sun rises and in thanksgiving as it sets.
Community is only being created when they have recognized that the greatness of man is to accept his insignificance, his human condition and his earth, and to thank God for having put in a finite body the seeds of eternity which are visible in small and daily gestures of love and forgiveness. The beauty of man is in this fidelity to the wonder of each day.”
Jean Vanier

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Solitude

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing.
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness:
So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another.
Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Many people suffer from the fear of finding oneself alone,
and so they don’t find themselves at all.
Rollo May

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private:
and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
C.S. Lewis

What a commentary on civilization,
when being alone is being suspect;
when one has to apologize for it, make excuses,
hide the fact that one practices it -
like a secret vice.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Each of us is alone in the world.
It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness.
When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen.
Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging.
This is a slow and open-ended transition
but it is utterly vital in order
to come into rhythm with your own individuality.
John O’Donohue

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Slow Dance

Dennis Binda   – Japanese Cranes

Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight,
or gazed at the sun fading into the night?

You better slow down, don’t dance so fast,
time is short, the music won’t last.

Do you run through each day on the fly,
when you ask “How are you?”, do you hear the reply?
When the day is done, do you lie in your bed,
with the next hundred chores running through your head?

You better slow down, don’t dance so fast,
time is short, the music won’t last.

Ever told your child, we’ll do it tomorrow,
and in your haste, not see his sorrow?
Ever lost touch, let a friendship die,
’cause you never had time to call and say hi?

You better slow down, don’t dance so fast,
time is short, the music won’t last.

When you run so fast to get somewhere,
you miss half the fun of getting there.
When you worry and hurry through your day,
it’s like an unopened gift thrown away.

Life isn’t a race, so take it slower,
hear the music before your song is over.

David L.Weatherford

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There are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who prey upon them with IBM eyes
And sell their hearts and guts for martinis at noon.
There are men too gentle for a savage world
Who dream instead of snow and children and Halloween
And wonder if the leaves will change their color soon.

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who anoint them for burial with greedy claws
And murder then for a merchant’s profit and gain.
There are men too gentle for a corporate world
Who dream instead of candied apples and ferris wheels
And pause to hear the distant whistle of a train.

There are men too gentle to live among wolves.
Who devour them with eager appetite and search
For other men to prey upon and suck their childhood dry.
There are men too gentle for an accountant’s world
Who dream instead of Easter eggs and fragrant grass
And search for beauty in the mystery of the sky.

There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who toss them like a lost and wounded dove.
Such gentle men are lonely in a merchant’s world.
Unless they have a gentle one to love.

James Kavanaugh

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Books 4

Valentin Rekunenko

The books that help you most
are those which make you think that most.
The hardest way of learning is
that of easy reading;
but a great book that comes from a great thinker
is a ship of thought,
deep freighted with truth and beauty.
Pablo Neruda

The best moments in reading are when you come across something -
a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things -
which you had thought special and particular to you.
And now, here it is, set down by someone else,
a person you have never met,
someone even who is long dead.
And it is as if a hand has come out,
and taken yours.
Alan Bennett

A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone,
if it is to keep its edge.
George R.R. Martin

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture.
Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Bradbury

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Nature

Pierre-Auguste Renoir – Woman with a Parasol in a Garden,  1875

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth
find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature –
the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.
Rachel Carson

We know that God is everywhere;
but certainly we feel His presence most
when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us;
and it is in the unclouded night-sky,
where His worlds wheel their silent course,
that we read clearest His infinitude,
His omnipotence, His omnipresence.
Charlotte Brontë

We need the tonic of wildness…
At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things,
we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable,
that land and sea be indefinitely wild,
unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable.
We can never have enough of nature.
Henry David Thoreau

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses
are still truly adjusted to each other;
who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.
His intercourse with heaven and earth,
becomes part of his daily food.
In the presence of nature,
a wild delight runs through the man,
in spite of real sorrows…
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Ignorance

Theodore Gerard – The Collectors Studio

Time after time,
history demonstrates that when people
don’t want to believe something,
they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether.
Jim Butcher

History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and
nothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance,
hence it becomes the double enemy of civilization.
By its servility it is the prey of tyranny,
and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment.
Lemuel K. Washburn

No matter how big the lie;
repeat it often enough and
the masses will regard it as the truth.
John F. Kennedy

Nothing in the world is more dangerous
than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Ignorance is ultimately
the worst enemy of a people who want to be free.
Jonathan Hennessey

He who stands for nothing will fall for anything.
Alexander Hamilton

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley

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Integrity

George William Watts – Hope

It has always seemed strange to me…
the things we admire in men,
kindness and generosity, openness, honesty,
understanding and feeling,
are the concomitants of failure in our system.
And those traits we detest,
sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness,
egotism and self-interest,
are the traits of success.
And while men admire the quality of the first
they love the produce of the second.
John Steinbeck

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief,
if I may so express it,
that mental lying has produced in society.
When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted
the chastity of his mind
as to subscribe his professional belief to things
he does not believe
he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
Thomas Paine

The line separating good and evil
passes not through states,
nor between political parties either -
but right through every human heart.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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