praise

People who praise a leader even when he is doing the wrong things are the main reasons why his fall is near.

When efforts that are wisely executed, the situation and condition don't affect the performance.

The elegance under pressure is the result of fearlessness.

Uplift your soul with music.

Music is soul of the spirit.

Directing praise to oneself is to cash in on the ego in order to bankrupt the soul.

Don't lose hope. If your hope gets lost, the other side called "failure" begins to win! The quickest medicine to heal a depressed soul is to command; "arise my soul and praise the Lord". Hope is the clothe piece in which wraps a healthy soul!

Gratitude is glory to God.

The Holy God.The righteous God.The supreme God.

The heavens declare the glory of God.The heavens declare the majesty King.The heavens declare the marvellous Lord.The heavens declare the mighty Saviour.

All glory to the great God of wonders!

Music gives infinite strength.

We fall on our knees in awe of God__ greatness.

The aim is to love God because the pure heart loves loving God and because the true mind knows He deserves it. Unlike the accusations and beliefs of the critics and skeptics, it is neither an obligation of duty; nor a fear of damnation; nor a wish for power; nor a desire to appear more righteous than others; nor because God needs it; but because through all love, truth, reason, faith, honesty, and joy in and beyond oneself and the universe, He is worthy.

I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment. There are many created things in the universe that outlive us, that outlive the sun, even, but I can__ think about them. I live with trees. There are creatures under our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and in addition, they extend impressively in both directions, up and down, shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach.

In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there.I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, __hen you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.

Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the rings of Saturn are. But here we live and move; we wander up and down the banks of the creek, we ride a railway through the Alps, and the landscape shifts and changes. Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture and lapse into dreamless sleep. Because we are living people, and because we are on the receiving end of beauty, another element necessarily enters the question. The texture of space is a condition of time. Time is the warp and matter the weft of woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurtling shuttle_ What I want to do, then, is add time to the texture, paint the landscape on an unrolling scroll, and set the giant relief globe spinning on it stand.

Xerxes, I read, __alted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction_ the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain_you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven__ you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered_there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse_and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe. __e had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life._ We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn__ it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don__ know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.