Easy to be Proud

How can people have no feelings

How can they ignore their friends

Easy to be proud

Easy to say no

And especially people who care about strangers

Who care about evil

And social and justice

Do you only care about the bleeding crowd?

How about a needing friend?

I need a friend

-Easy to be Hard, Hair

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCs1rkAXZ9o&feature=related

Our Citadel Cannot Fall

It is hardly surprising if we are driven by blasts of storms when our chief aim on this sea of life is to displease wicked men. And though their numbers are great, we can afford to despise them because they have no one to lead them them and are carried along only by ignorance which distracts them at random first one way then another. When their forces attack us in superior numbers, our general conducts a tactical withdrawal of his forces to a strong point, and they are left to encumber themselves with useless plunder. Safe from their furious activity on our rampart above, we can smile at their efforts collect all the most useless boot: our citadel cannot fall to the assaults of folly.

-Ancius Boethius, trans. Victor Watts, The Consolation of Philosophy

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Anicius_Manlius_Severinus_Boethius

If you Lose your Way

We love you and there's nothing you can ever do about it

If you get off track, turn around and come right back

We love you and there's nothing you can ever do about it

Is you lose your way, you still got a place to stay

-Brian Courtney Wilson, Just Love

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvq2GrJC_eM

We Wear a Mask

We all tell lies and hide our true feelings, for complete and free expression is a social impossibility. From an early age we learn to conceal our thoughts, telling the prickly and insecure what we know they want to hear, watching carefully lest we offend them. For most of us this is natural- there are ideas and values that most people accept, and it is pointless to argue. We believe what we want to, but on the outside we wear a mask.

There are people, however, who see such restraints as an intolerable infringement on their freedom, and who have a need to prove the superiority of their values and beliefs. In the end, though, their arguments convince only a few and offend a great deal more. The reason arguments do not work is that most people hold their ideas and values without thinking about them. There is a strong emotional content in their beliefs; They really do not want to have to rework their habits of thinking, and when you challenge them, whether directly through your arguments, or indirectly through your behavior, they are hostile.

Wise and clever people learn early on that they can display conventional behavior and mouth conventional ideas without having to believe in them. The power these people gain from blending in is that of being left alone to have the thoughts they want to have, and to express them to the people they want to express them to, without suffering isolation or ostracism. Once they have established themselves in a position of power, they can try to convince a wider circle of the correctness of their ideas- perhaps working indirectly, using Campanella's strategies of irony and insinuation.

-Robert Greene, The Art of Power

http://www.powerseductionandwar.com/

Darned into the Seams

"He is always careful about his appearance," Sophie agreed, and wondered why she was putting it so mildly.

"And always was. I am careful about my appearance too, and I see no harm in that," said Mrs. Pentstemmon. "But what call has he to be walking around in a charmed suit? It is a dazzling attraction charm, directed at ladies- very well done, I admit, and barely detectable even to my trained eye, since it appears to have been darned into the seams- and one which will render him almost irresistible to ladies. This represents a downward trend into black arts, which most surely cause you some motherly concern, Mrs. Pendragon."

-Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle

http://www.leemac.freeserve.co.uk/

Humble Pie

Sometimes we know, sometimes we don't

Sometimes we give, sometimes we won't

Sometimes we're strong, sometimes we're wrong

Sometimes we cry

Sometimes it's bad when the going gets tough

When we look in the mirror and we want to give up

Sometimes we don't even think we'll try

Sometimes we cry

Well we're gonna have to sit down and think it right through

If we're only human what more can we do?

Sometimes the only thing to do is eat humble pie

Sometimes we cry

-Van Morrison, Sometimes We Cry

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6COPFRp5_Q

A Seed you have Planted

Think of your t'ai chi form as a seed you have planted in the garden of your life. Each seed has its own time schedule. Of course, there are many techniques for speeding up the growth process, including artificial light and greenhouses. And yet, as every gardener knows, flowers and plants produced under these conditions are not hardy. The moment they leave the greenhouse they begin to die, living only long enough to get sold and be kept at home for a few days.

Experienced t'chai practitioners (known as 'players') may learn a form more quickly, but they will go home and spend many months practicing and deepening their understanding. There is no shortcut that will substitute for that kind of practice time that will cause your form to flower.

-T'ai Chi as a Path of Wisdom, Linda Myoki Lehrhaupt

http://www.fullcirclesynergy.com/works2.html

Whoever Lives only with That

In all seriousness of the truth, listen: without It a human being cannot live. But whoever lives only with that is not human.

-Martin Buber, I and Thou

http://buber.de/en/i_thou