Miriam Makeba Quotes

Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it. I can spend half a dozen hours reading a book and then have only a foggy notion of what it was about.

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant.

Try as i do, i can't recall her surname. Indeed, her very abstractedness and insubstantial personality seemed to say 'forget me'; she seemed to live in parenthesis.

...the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.

Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.

Negative thinking creates clouds at critical decision times.

I try to be self-disciplined with my thoughts. It’s our thoughts that matter most, and all the rest falls into line behind that: if I remember who I really am and why I’m on the earth, then I more naturally want to treat my body like a temple and so forth.

I didn't fight or shame my thoughts, I questioned them, and they stopped shaming me.

She was the music heard faintly on the edge of sound.

The main factor in meditation is to keep the mind active in its own pursuit without taking in external impressions or thinking of other matters.

not all thoughts have to become words!

The first step is learning to monitor your thoughts; to think about what you are thinking about.

Posterity shall know of me even less than I shall know of posterity.

We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.

My dull brain was wrought with things forgotten.

Thought the mind can justify itself faster than the speed of light, it can be stopped through the act of writing.

His mind is so open - so open that ideas simply pass through it.

Nothing lasts, you see, not even the thoughts inside you. And you musn't waste your time looking for them. Once a thing is gone, that is the end of it.

My brain's just full of passwords.

Learn to become still, and take your attention away from what you don't want

When you meditate you have to try to quiet and calm the mind. There should be no thought within the mind. Right now you feel that if you can cherish twenty ideas at a time, then you are the wisest man on earth. The more thoughts that enter into our minds, the more clever we feel we are. But in the spiritual life it is not like that. If consciously we can make the mind calm and quiet, we feel that a new creation dawns inside us.

Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.

We often forget our dreams so speedily: if we cannot catch them as they are passing out at the door, we never set eyes on them again.

To vanish in the chinks that Time has made.

We pursue modernity in her incessant metamorphoses yet we never manage to trap her. She always escapes: each encounter ends in flight. We embrace her and she disappears immediately: it was just a little air. It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to trap it alive but it flaps its wings and vanishes in the form of a handful of syllables. We are left empty-handed. Then the doors of perception open slightly and the other time appears, the real one we were searching for without knowing it: the present, the presence.