ourselves

The survivor spoke to us though, or tried to. Mumbling through that matted brown beard of his, pale as death itself. I can__ say now if it was weakness from his wounds or what it was _ but we struggled to understand him. In fact we got nothing intelligible from him at all then. He seemed afraid, like any dying man probably would be, but he did seem more terrified than any dying man I__e seen before _ and I__e seen a few in my time. Let me tell you, Corsair or not, he grabbed whatever hand would hold his, and clenched it so tight his knuckles turned white! He kept fading out as we carried him on the stretcher board the medics brought with them. Looking back, I think he tried to warn us, poor bastard. He tried to tell us to leave him behind and go, but we wouldn__ listen. We thought we were better than the Corsairs, remember? We thought we would be all moral and upright and try to help him. __on__ say I didn__ warn you._ were the last words he said before losing consciousness. At least, those that we could make out. At the end of it all, he was right _ as it turned out, we couldn__ even help ourselves.

And so to tame Christmas we spin myths to temper the story, we create our own caricatures to speak our own lines into the script, we gift ourselves to enhance an adventure now lagging, and we think we__e on a grand adventure when we__e completely forgotten what an adventure is.

Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.

None of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough.

The problem with holiness is that once we look into the face of it we are no longer capable of taking that which is odious and filthy and somehow pretending that it__ translucent and clean. In other words, we have to do one of the most revolting things possible; we have to face ourselves.

We are, at least in part, who we remember ourselves to be. Take away our memories, and you take away our selves.

To fully understand how utterly amazing we really are we must first understand all of the things about us that are not, and then we must make our habitation where they are not.

We're better off not worrying about ourselves, and to do that, we have to worry about others.

29. Most loneliness results from insulation rather than isolation. In other words, we are lonely because we insulate ourselves, not because others isolate us.

We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit.

Real geniuses would like that what we think of ourselves is true.

If what we think of ourselves were true, the planet would overflow with geniuses.

Long ago we conquered our passions looking at ourselves in the mirror of eternity.

Sometimes we want to believe something so badly that we allow ourselves to be taken advantage of.

We appealed to the conscience of the world. The world has no conscience. We have no one but ourselves."The fight. The struggle. The historic destiny. The return of the people. The cause: life therefore having a meaning and shape that eludes the rest of us in the endless wash of 'What the hell are we doing here?' In a single day, says an Israeli friend, he experiences events and emotions that would keep a Swede going for a year.

Could it be that we lost something because had we not lost it, we would have lost ourselves?

The universe is not a stagnant place where technology stands still and only the few govern its destiny. Rather, it is a multidimensional dynamic entity that interacts with all things, even the very smallest. And what part we each place in it and the effect we have on it is a matter of our own choice.

Life - Don't waste it!