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Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.

Albert Einstein

When the dog is chasing after you, whistle for him.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Flowers for the lovers, Schnapps for the thinkers, Death to the vegetarians.

It is reported that a Sufi mystic was traveling and came to a town. And his name had reached there before him, his fame was already known. So people gathered together and said, “Preach something to us.”

The mystic said, “I am not a wise man, because I am a fool also. You will be confused by my teachings, so better let me keep quiet.” But the more he tried to avoid it, the more they insisted, the more they became intrigued by his personality.

Finally he yielded and he said, “Okay. This coming Friday I will come to the mosque…” – it was a Mohammedan village – “and what do you want me to talk about?”

They said, “Of course, about God.”

So he came. The whole village gathered, he had created such a sensation. He stood at the pulpit and asked a question: “Do you know anything about what I am going to say about God?”

The villagers of course replied, “No, we don’t know what you are going to say.”

“Then,” he said, “it is useless, because if you don’t know at all, you will not be able to understand A little preparation is needed, and you are absolutely unprepared. It is going to be futile and I will not speak.” He left the mosque.

The villagers were at a loss: what to do? They persuaded him again the next Friday. The next Friday he again came. He asked the same question; all the villagers were ready. He asked, “Do you know what I am going to talk to you about?”

They said, “Yes, of course.”

So he said, “Then there is no need to talk. If you already know – finished. Why unnecessarily bother me and waste your time?” He left the mosque.

The villagers were completely puzzled: what to do with this man? But now their interest was going mad. He must be hiding something! So they again persuaded him somehow.

He came, and again he asked the same question: “Do you know what I am going to talk about?”

Now the villagers had become a little wiser. They said, “Half of us know, and half of us don’t know.”

The mystic said, “Then there is no need. Those who know can tell those who don’t know.”

Osho

“I try not to dwell on paralysis,” John Callahan once told me. “Unless I want a Chinese takeaway and the person with me doesn’t want to go out in the rain to collect it. Then I subtly bring the conversation round to the fact that I’m quadriplegic. That way, I know I’ll be looking at egg foo yung quite soon.”
[…]
Not all of his work was provocative: he sent me a drawing a few years ago that showed two dogs drinking from elegantly labelled water bottles. “You know,” one is saying, “this stuff probably doesn’t even come from a toilet. It probably comes from a fresh mountain stream, or something.”
[…]
“I think it’s significant that liberals can’t quite decide what to call us. You’re now referred to as ‘a person with a disability’. Recently they’ve become fond of ‘differently abled’. On the whole, I’d rather be called a cripple. It’s so romantic. It’s so D.H. Lawrence.”
[…]
The last original drawing he sent me, not long before his death, showed him sitting in front of the television, his tears represented by two dotted lines falling to the floor.
“That’s me,” he wrote on the bottom, “listening to a song by Elvis Costello, on Letterman. It was so beautiful.” Music was as great a passion for Callahan as art or humour. He was proud to be one of the very few men, in recent years, to have been sought out by Bob Dylan.
“He walked up to me,” John told me, “and I felt my heart beating faster. I opened my mouth and I heard myself saying: ‘I write songs, too.’ What more stupid thing could you blurt out to Dylan? It’s like meeting Jesus and saying: ‘I too have suffered at the hands of my enemies.’”

In 1993, the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film went to Fernando Trueba. In his acceptance speech, he said: “I would like to believe in God in order to thank him but I just believe in Billy Wilder … So, thank you, Mr. Wilder.” The day after, according to Trueba, Wilder phoned him and said: “Fernando, it’s God.”

The Book of Love is long and boring
no one can lift the damn thing
it’s full of charts and facts and figures
and instructions for dancing