"Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble."

Arabic parable

“I am hitched by a thread to the world.”

St Francis of Assisi

“I play the notes the same as anybody else, but it’s the spaces between the notes….”

Arthur Schnabel

“"Seek to understand and then be understood".

Stephen Covey, NLP practitioner

"You get the best effort from others not by lighting a fire beneath them, but by building a fire within."
Bob Nelson (retired American Footballer)

“Friendship is a school of love”

Thomas Aquinas

“Who can do anything after Beethoven?”

Franz Schubert, whilst still at school

“My soul grows through music”

Karl Heinz Stockhausen

“Having been unable to strengthen justice, we have justified strength.”
-Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (1623-1662)

"I can honestly say that I was never affected by the question of the success of an undertaking. If I felt it was the right thing to do, I was for it regardless of the possible outcome."                                                      

     —Golda Meir

“One child makes you a parent; two make you a referee”.

David Frost

“Don’t ask what you want from life but what life wants from you”

“Be your own lamp and seek refuge in no other. Let truth be your light”.

Buddha

“If you can’t have what you love, then love what you have”

“My voice is my possessor. I am the servant of my voice.”

Luciano Pavarotti

“I pick up a pen and a building flows out of it”.

Oscar Niemeyer, Brazilian Architect

“I don’t like pianos, I like music more”

Sviatoslav Richter

“Remain a fool at all costs”

Norman Mailer

If you want happiness for an hour—take a nap.
If you want happiness for a day—go fishing.
If you want happiness for a month—get married.
If you want happiness for a year—inherit a fortune.
If you want happiness for a lifetime—help others.
-Chinese Proverb

For a monk, not talking has an intrinsic value, since it is then that he is able to listen, notably to the "still, small voice of God". To put it in secular terms, silence is necessary in order to perceive and understand things.

As Thomas Carlyle wrote: "Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is as deep as Eternity; speech is as shallow as time."

"He simply plays. He is a free man"

Of S. Richter

" I always paint what goes through my head, without giving it another thought"

Freda Kahlo

"The difficulty of being understood is the cross that anyone with anything new to say must bear." Prokofiev

“If you are afraid to play a wrong note, the other notes sound less right.”

Clifford Curzon

You don't ask a chef to cook baby food

Arthur Schnabell, when saying that he expects students to have mastered the techniques before becoming his pupil.

Every part of the personality you do not love will become hostile to you.
~Carl Jung

I think everyone should write. You can shout really effectively when you write.

Paul Abbott, Author

I become most exhausted when the audience is unresponsive

Wolfe Bowart – theatre clown and writer - the London Mine Festival Jan 07.

God is the ground of our being

- Paul Tillich

Laughter is more important in a tragedy than a comedy

...and…

Doubt is the most crippling thing you can have.

- Actor talking about their experience with Dan Crawford, Founder, Kings Head Theatre, Islington.

We are healed of a suffering only by expressing it to the full.

-Marcel Proust, novelist (1871-1922)

He who dares not offend cannot be honest.

-Thomas Paine, philosopher and writer (1737-1809)

The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words
return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.

-Florence Scovel Shinn, writer, artist and teacher (1871-1940)

Many of life's failures are people who did not realise how close they were to success when they gave up

- Thomas Edison

Leaders see more in other people than other people see in themselves"

-Unknown

If we convey what we perceive and experience through the language of logic, it is called science; if we convey it through symbols, which are inaccessible to the rational mind but intuitively comprehended, it is called art.

- Albert Einstein

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn
human actions, but to understand.

-Baruch Spinoza, philosopher (1632-1677)

"Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right."

- Henry Ford

Thought for the Day, 9 November 2006

The Rev. Rosemary Lain-Priestly

Good morning,

In Tel Aviv last Saturday 100 000 Israelis gathered to remember Yitzhak Rabin, their former Prime Minister assassinated 11 years ago whilst attempting to lead the nation towards peace. The crowd was addressed by David Grossman, the secular Jew, Israeli author and peace activist whose son Uri was killed this year whilst on national service in the Israeli army in Lebanon. Grossman called on the Government to renew conversation with Palestinian moderates, saying that the truth Rabin grasped over a decade ago remains true - that to live in a constant state of violence and unresolved conflict is a tragic waste of life for everyone.

Unresolved conflict damages and constrains us. It reduces our capacity to form good relationships, to renew ourselves, to be fully what we might be. Regardless of where we place the blame we are diminished by conflict until a resolution is found. This happens whether it's a long-running feud at work, an unspoken resentment between ourselves and a friend, or a family issue that is always skirted around and never fully faced.

In the Christian Gospels there is a story of a woman who had suffered a hemorrhage for 12 years. She believed that if only she could touch the fringe of Jesus' cloak she would be healed. Her faith in the possibility of change after so long is astounding. Steeled against the shame of making a public spectacle of herself, she pushes through the crowd and makes the connection with Jesus. It takes serious guts, but she does what is necessary to change the situation that is distorting her life.

The image of the hemorrhaging of blood mirrors what happens when we allow unresolved conflict to shape our lives. It results in a sort of spiritual and mental anaemia - a diminished capacity to do or even say anything because our resources are so are so leeched by that one un-faced issue that there's little energy left for anything else.

David Grossman was saying that two nations cannot live that way any longer, unless they accept that the lives of all of their children will be warped, drained, even destroyed by the continuing struggle.

We often avoid dealing with our buried conflicts because to surface them feels risky, and demands the courage to be vulnerable to others. Our pride, self-perceptions and public image are all at stake. We've developed coping mechanisms that now define us, and without them we're not sure what we might be. But the life-giving choice is in our hands. No one else will make it for us. As Grossman knows, whether the bereavement we suffer is national or acutely personal, the death of our hopes and dreams, the squandering of the miracle of human life, is a terrible tragedy.

"Fire cannot put out a fire"

Refugee in Darfur

"Power is never given; it has to be taken"

Martin Luther King

" A drawing is taking a line for a walk'

Escher

" It was not courage but the absence of anxiety"

"In order to live a full life you have to burn with passion about something"

“Searching for perfection (in music) makes it cold and soulless”

“Economics without spirituality is like sex without love”

E. Schumacher

“Freedom is always a vanishing road on the horizon. It’s what you do on the way that counts”

JP Sartre

“Trust is very little about the other person and everything about you”.

“The previous girl friend does the crime – the present girl friend does the time”

Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all. -Thomas Szasz, author, professor of psychiatry (1920- )

 “Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten”

“When two people meet, there are six people in the room. The person as they see themselves, the person as others see them and the person as they really are”.

People are people because of other people

Fergal Keane

PR “How to make the important interesting”

Failure never did anyone any harm. It is the fear of failure that harms. We may be afraid to go down a dark street, but at the end there may be something glorious. Jack Lemon. Desert Island Discs   7.7.01

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness. - Leo Tolstoy, novelist and philosopher (1828-1910)

He acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his actions. -Confucius, philosopher and teacher (c. 551-478 BCE)