People From Chicago

"There is no problem so big that it cannot be run away from."… "You're quoting Snoopy the dog, I believe?" "I'll quote the truth wherever I find it thank you."

"The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in awhile, and watch your answers change."

"The original sin is to limit the Is. —Don't."

"The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work."

"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."

"The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof."

"The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, "I've got responsibilities.""

"Remember where you came from, where you're going, and why you created the mess you got yourself into in the first place."

"Perspective— Use It or Lose It. If you turned to this page, you're forgetting that what is going on around you is not reality. Think about that."

"Live never to be ashamed if anything you say or do is published around the world, even if what is said is not true."

"Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, and teachers."

"In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice."

"Imagine the universe beautiful and just and perfect. Then be sure of one thing: The Is has imagined it quite a bit better than you have."

"If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem."

"If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats."

"If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production out of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That's all there is to it."

"Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you're alive, it isn't."

"Everything in this book may be wrong."

"Every person, all the events of your life, are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you."

"Don't be dismayed at goodbyes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends."

"Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours."

"A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed, it feels an impulsion... this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reason and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons."

"26. And [the Messiah] said unto them, "If a man told God that he wanted most of all to help the suffering world, no matter the price to himself, and God answered and told him what he must do, should the man do as he is told?"27. "Of course, Master!" cried the many. "It should be pleasure for him to suffer the tortures of hell itself, should God ask it!"28. "No matter what those tortures, no matter how difficult the task?"29. "Honor to be hanged, glory to be nailed to a tree and burned, if so be that God has asked," said they.30. "And what would you do," the Master said unto the multitude, "if God spoke directly to your face and said, 'I COMMAND THAT YOU BE HAPPY IN THE WORLD, AS LONG AS YOU LIVE.' What would you do then?"31. And the multitude was silent, not a voice, not a sound was heard upon the hillsides, across the valleys where they stood."

"11. The Master answered and said "Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river.12. "The current of the river swept silently over them all — young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self.13. "Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth.14. "But one creature said at last, 'I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.'15. "The other creatures laughed and said, 'Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed against the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!'16. "But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.17. "Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.18. "And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried 'See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah come to save us all!'19. "And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure."20. "But they cried the more, 'Savior!' all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a Savior.""

"Such promises are only for the gulls that accept the ordinary. One who has touched excellence in his learning has no need of that kind of promise."

"The only true law is that which leads to freedom," Jonathan said. "There is no other."

"You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn't have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there."

"The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly."

"If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we've destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don't you think that we might see each other once or twice?"

"But the speed was power, and the speed was joy, and the speed was pure beauty."

"Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding."

"The gull sees farthest who flies highest."

"Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short, and with these gone from his thoughts, he lived a long fine life indeed."

"We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill."

"Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight — how to get from shore to food and back again."

"For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight."

"If it's never our fault, we can't take responsibility for it. If we can't take responsibility for it, we'll always be its victim."

"Not being known doesn't stop the truth from being true."

"Fly free and happy beyond birthdays and across forever, and we'll meet now and then when we wish, in the midst of the one celebration that never can end."

"You have no birthday because you have always lived; you were never born, and never will die. You are not the child of the people you call mother and father, but their fellow-adventurer on a bright journey to understand the things that are."

"“Art is an optimist,” Nadia said to Maya as they walked on. “Art is an idiot,” Maya replied."

"Yes. God makes the world using mathematics, and he has given us minds that can see it. We can discover the laws He used! It is a most beautiful thing to witness and understand! It's prayer. It's more than prayer, it's a sacrament, a kind of communion. An apprehension—an epiphany—it's seeing God, while still in this body and in this world! How blessed we are, to be able to experience God like that! Who would not devote their time to understanding more, to seeing deeper in God's manner of thinking about these things?"

"You could never teach other people anything that mattered. The important things they had to learn for themselves, almost always by making mistakes, so that the lessons arrived too late to help. Experience was in that sense useless. It was precisely what could not be passed along in a lesson or an equation."

"The sky itself is the eighth color of the rainbow, spread over the whole sky for us, all the time."

"This vain presumption, of understanding everything, can have no other basis than never understanding anything. For anyone who had experienced just once the understanding of one single thing, thus truly tasting how knowledge is accomplished, would then recognize that of the infinity of other truths, he understands nothing."

"Fights over ideas are the most vicious of all. If it were merely food, or water, or shelter, we would work something out. But in the realm of ideas one can become idealistic."

"One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself."

"When some French were assembling an encyclopedia of paranormal experiences, they decided to leave déjà vu out, because it was so common it could not be considered paranormal."

"There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future."

"We all have seven secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes; our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one ever knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone."