kalabalik

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!


--Rudyard Kipling

Thomas Mann wrote that he would rather participate in life…
than write a hundred stories.
Giacometti was once run down by a car,
and he recalled falling into a lucid faint,
a sudden exhilaration,
as he realized at last something was happening to him.
An assumption develops that you cannot understand life and live life simultaneously.
I do not agree entirely. Which is to say I do not exactly disagree.
I would say that life understood is life lived.
But the paradoxes bug me,
and I can learn to love and make love…
to the paradoxes that bug me.
And on really romantic evenings of self,
I go salsa dancing with my confusion.
Before you drift off, don't forget.
Which is to say, remember.
Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting.
Lorca in that same poem said…
that the iguana will bite those who do not dream.

And as one realizes…
that one is a dream figure…
in another person's dream,
that is self-awareness…
You haven't met yourself yet.
But the advantage to meeting others in the meantime…
is that one of them may present you to yourself.
Examine the nature…
of everything you observe.


- From the movie Waking Life

Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

When you lose, don't lose the lesson.
Respect for self, respect for others, and responsibility for all your actions.

Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

Open your arms to change, but don't let go of your values.
Spend some time alone every day. Approach love with reckless abandon.

Share your knowledge, it's a way to achieve immortality.

Be gentle with the earth.




Dance like nobody's watching'

yes, there's a glitch in the matrix