Patjbattag's Wisdom Page

One of the most radical things women can do is to love their body. The truth of the matter is, every moment we spend worrying about our bodies, and not necessarily taking care of them, somebody is figuring out how to take money away from the poor, destroy the environment, drill, frack, burn, rape and violate women, and we’re not paying attention. Be radical: Love your body!

I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.

In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.

There's a part of every living thing that wants to become itself, the tadpole into the frog, the chrysalis into the butterfly, a damaged human being into a whole one. That is spirituality.

It is not power that corrupts, it is fear.

In still moments by the sea life seems large-drawn and simple. It is there we can see into ourselves.

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring.

I am only one, But still I am one. I cannot do everything, But still I can do something; And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.

No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.