Reflections on his life from Camus

Here's to hope, faith, persistence and resilience at Christmastime and in the new year......

Reflections on life from Albert Camus. 

“My dear, 

In the midst of hate, 

I found there was, within me, 

an invincible love. 

In the midst of tears, 

I found there was, within me, 

an invincible smile. 

In the midst of chaos, 

I found there was, within me, 

an invincible calm. 

I realized, through it all, that; 

In the midst of winter,

I found there was, within me, 

an invincible summer. 

And that makes me happy. 

For it says that no matter 

how hard the world pushes 

against me, within me, 

there’s something stronger,

something better, 

pushing right back. 

Truly yours, 

Albert Camus,” Summer in Algiers

Quotes about letting go

The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it. --Carl Jung

Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go. --Hermann Hesse

Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on. --Eckhart Tolle

Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity, and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow. --Tony Schwartz

Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties. --Gail Sheehy

Courage is the power to let go of the familiar. --Raymond Lindquist

The world belongs to those who let go.  --Tao Te Ching

Everything I read about hitting a midlife crisis was true. I had such a struggle letting go of youthful things and learning how to exist and have enthusiasm while settling into the comfort of an older age. --David Bowie

Forgiveness means letting go of the past. --Gerald Jampolsky

For me, every single thing I do seems to be about the process of letting go because that's what I so desperately need to do with so many things: with fear, with what people think of me, and all these things I've worried about my whole life. --John Grant

There's a victory in letting go of your expectations. --Mike White

I think that what I have been truly searching for as a person, as a writer, as a thinker, as a daughter, is freedom. That is my mission. A sense of liberty, the liberty that comes not only from self-awareness but also from letting go of many things. Many things that weigh us down. --Jhumpa Lahiri

When you feel stuck in a hard time, jump-start a pro-change attitude by letting go of possessions that no longer work for you - like old clothes and old shoes. --Karen Salmansohn

Being deeply contented with God in my everyday life is a focused attitude. It is always available. It means practicing letting go of my obsession with how I'm doing. It means training myself to learn to actually be present with people, and seeking to love them. --John Ortberg

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone. --Henry David Thoreau

 

A good reminder

 

Worth learning and re-learning

Dealing with weariness of soul

 It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit. --Robert Louis Stevenson

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral. --Robert Louis Stevenson

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. --Epicurus

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world! --William Shakespeare

Christian, learn from Christ how you ought to love Christ. Learn a love that is tender, wise, strong; love with tenderness, not passion, wisdom, not foolishness, and strength, lest you become weary and turn away from the love of the Lord. --Saint Bernard

The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians. --Benjamin Disraeli

People have become so weary of all the government and media dishonesty, the all-too-commonplace lying, that most Americans have stopped listening. --Wayne LaPierre

I always have doubts. I am weary of people. --Bae Suzy

Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do. --Eric Hoffer

I've shot a lot of pilots that have never seen the light of day, jobs that have fallen apart or gotten canceled, so I'm really weary about what contracts I sign and where I swear my loyalty to. --D. J. Cotrona

I'm very conscious and weary of the hype economy and the way people build things up just to tear them down. --Hari Nef

Some of our life experience makes us weary of love and make it difficult to forgive others. Parvathy

Quotes about ethics

Ethics are moral principles that govern a person's behaviour or the conducting of an activity (definition from an online dictionary). Given the utter lack of ethics that abound in American politics at present, I thought some reminders about ethics, in the form of quotations by different individuals, some well-known and some not, would be relevant. Perhaps just reading some of them will re-inspire politicians to want to behave ethically. We need all the help we can get.

In just about every area of society, there's nothing more important than ethics. --Henry Paulson

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings. --Albert Schweitzer

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life. --Albert Schweitzer

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind. --Albert Schweitzer

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages. --Thomas A. Edison

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world. --Albert Camus

That's a central part of philosophy, of ethics. What do I owe to strangers? What do I owe to my family? What is it to live a good life? Those are questions which we face as individuals. --Peter Singer

Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar. --D. H. Lawrence

Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do. --Potter Stewart

Apart from values and ethics which I have tried to live by, the legacy I would like to leave behind is a very simple one - that I have always stood up for what I consider to be the right thing, and I have tried to be as fair and equitable as I could be. --Ratan Tata

You don't teach morals and ethics and empathy and kindness in the schools. You teach that at home, and children learn by example. --Judy Sheindlin

Great people have great values and great ethics. --Jeffrey Gitomer

The importance of gardens and gardening

• The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. --George Bernard Shaw
• The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul. --Alfred Austin
• No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden. --Thomas Jefferson
• Let us not forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. When tillage begins, other arts will follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization. --Daniel Webster
• Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers. --May Sarton
• How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening. --Alexander Smith
• Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful,' and sitting in the shade. --Rudyard Kipling
• A garden requires patient labor and attention. Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions. They thrive because someone expended effort on them. --Liberty Hyde Bailey
• To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. --William Blake
• Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get. --H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
• A good garden may have some weeds. --Thomas Fuller
• A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows. --Doug Larson
• Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul. --Luther Burbank
• Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace. --May Sarton
• It's true that I have a wide range of interests. I like to write and paint and make music and go walking on my own and garden. In fact, gardening is probably what I enjoy doing more than anything else. --Viggo Mortensen
• God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. --Francis Bacon
• We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough? --Wendell Berry
• When the flower blooms, the bees come uninvited. --Ramakrishna