Window Quotes - page 38
What happened was, 2,400 years ago, the Greek Gang of Three, by whom I mean Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, started to think based on analysis, judgment and knowledge. At the same time, church people, who ran the schools and universities, wanted logic to prove the heretics wrong. As a result, design and perceptual thinking was never developed. People assumed philosophers were doing it and so they blocked anyone else from doing it. But philosophers were not. Philosophers may look out at the world from a stained-glass window, but after a while they stop looking at the world and start looking at the stained glass.
Edward de Bono
If you look out that window, it's so amazing, and the countryside is being murdered. People don't understand what is being done to their countryside. In some parts of the world, they seem to understand it better than here. Here we don't seem to get it that the fields are being wrecked by poisons and the air is close to the end of breathable. There is a great effort in America to stay happy and not worry and not understand and not do anything about it.
Grace Paley
"Napoleon will at first, no dobt, drive the Duke of Wellington. That I shall be sorry for . But I want to see Lord Castlereagh's head carried on a pike beneath that window." This feeling, violent as it is, seems to have been pretty deliberately cherished by Lord Byron. It is expressed in his conversation a few days later.
Lord Byron
Shakespeare said: "There comes a tide in the affairs of men which, if taken at the flood, moves on to fortune.” Shakespeare was initiate. He knew all about this, and throughout his works are the answers. The aim is to recognize the window of opportunity, to be so skilled and so in the rhythm of your work, that when it opens, you are there. If there is no rhythm, you could be asleep. If you set a rhythm and never sleep - I do not mean never go to sleep in bed - but if you are not mentally asleep, and do not turn off your consciousness, if you keep your consciousness alive and aware all the time, then when the window of opportunity comes you recognize it because you are in that rhythm. If you are not in the rhythm, you could miss it. This is the importance of rhythm, which of course has nothing to do with time. It is to do with awareness, a rhythmic awareness of setting, not goals, but a pattern of action, so you are always ready, "brush in hand”.
Benjamin Creme
Yes-the springtimes needed you. Often a star
was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you
out of the distant past, or as you walked
under an open window, a violin
yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.
But could you accomplish it? Weren't you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)
Rainer Maria Rilke
I was in my room listening on headphones on a tape recorder. It's very intimate. It's like talking to somebody on the phone, like talking to John Lennon on the phone. I'm not exaggerating to say that. This music changed the shape of the room. It changed the shape of the world outside the room; the way you looked out the window and what you were looking at.
I remember John singing "Oh My Love." It's like a little hymn. It's certainly a prayer of some kind - even if he was an atheist. "Oh, my love/For the first time in my life/My eyes can see/I see the wind/Oh, I see the trees/Everything is clear in our world." For me it was like he was talking about the veil lifting off, the scales falling from the eyes. Seeing out the window with a new clarity that love brings you. I remember that feeling.
Yoko came up to me when I was in my twenties, and she put her hand on me and she said, "You are John's son." What an amazing compliment!
Bono
