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Dead Toad Scrolls

Book by Kilroy J. Oldster · 50 quotes · Memoir Writing, Memoir, Self Determination

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Dead Toad Scrolls Quotes

“Our life story is a reflection of our internal poetry in motion, a poem which lyrical lines croons life as a groping accident, a playful roughness, a throbbing ordeal. Life’s posy permutations jell together to create a brawly emotional ambiguity. An interlacement of untidy paradoxes, fastened by a tincture of pyretic hopelessness, sounds the charming pitch of life.”

“One of the salient facts of a self is that a person is constantly undergoing a series of actions in the immediacy of time that they must later reflect upon and synthesize new experiences, thoughts, feelings, and mental impression along with their latent memories into a collaborative sense of being.”

“Our remembered experiences and our present day hopes and desires form the spine of each person’s storybook. Knowledge of life and death are traceable facts that shape the contours of each person’s storyboard. Other truths gleaned from living brilliantly fill the pages of each person’s ongoing anthology.”

“In absence of consciousness, human beings would merely be animated material objects. Without the synergistic impact of consciousness, free will, and perception of a cohesive self, which act to direct human conduct, many of the qualities that we associate with our humanness would be moot or superfluous delusions including laughter and pain, memories and thoughts, love and anger, imagination and dreams. Without consciousness and free will, humankind would lack the ability to choose right from wrong and there could be no mental discipline directing each person’s lifestyle, attitudes, and belief systems.”

“The false sense of adventure wrought from walking a gangplank of amorous tropism embroiders a shallow life. Only religious mystics or persons exhibiting tremendous internal resources dedicate their lives to seeking a meaningful existence that transcends the festive indulgence of taking a pleasure cruise through life.”

“If we cleaved ourselves in half to examine our daily mind chatter under a microscope, who amongst us would daringly display the sediment of their innermost thoughts for public consumption? A tattler’s tale reporting the silted musings resembling my tarnished soul is probably the most typical scorecard. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), an English novelist and poet declared, “If all hearts were open and all desires known – as they would be if people showed their souls – how many gapings, sighings, clenched fists, knotted brows, broad grins, and red eyes should we see in the market place!” My unsavory report card is indistinguishable from the blemished masses. Etched into the end zone of my lifetime playing field are the horrors of gluttony, greed, failure, and humiliation. Recognition of my sinful life led directly to a rash act of despondency. Commission of a ream of sins is a reflection of my weak character. Guilt from leading a sinful life, not strong character, manufactured the overwhelming despair that caused me to seek absolution. The willingness to grade myself as less than a satisfactory human being might be my only hope of ever achieving spiritual salvation.”

“Writers and other artistic personalities historically attempted to describe art, what consist of, and inform us how a person creates art. If art is so difficult to describe and quantify, why do we feel compelled to attempt to describe the ineffable? At its core, does all art represent an attempt to communicate the unsayable? Is any discussion about art absurd? Is classifying a piece of writing as literature simply another form of elitism?”

“Talented writers etched the story detailing the travails of broken souls numerous times. The poets recounted an equal amount of times the lucent tears of human laughter and weeping sorrow. Everyone understands bitterness and joy. Conversely, the most evocative aspects of human beings, the bewildering clarification of their ambiguous natures, are virtually indefinable and therefore unutterable. Written testaments to love, truth, beauty, and adoration of nature are inherently weak because words fail to convey what a person experiences inside the spaces that compose their chemical field.”

“The goal of any spiritual person is to strive towards attaining self-realization by living spontaneously in the present moment of physical reality, free from anxiety and distress, unencumbered by frivolous affections, and liberated from specious attachments.”

“The dark, uncontrolled, primordial part of a person informs them that they are alive. Living free entails accepting a slew of wildness. All wild animals act by instinct. Human instinct and intuitive thought allow us to gain insights and new beliefs, which human rationalization confirms. Logic and intuition work well together, if both sources of mental visualization are drawn from when most apropos. Planning carefully should never replace the spirit for improvisation. Acting recklessly is no substitute for measured evaluation. Nonetheless, a dash of craziness makes most people more endearing than the calculating banker whose ledger driven life causes them to see life in terms of money pouches. Letting go of all conceptions of what is, and dreaming what could be, is a form of delusion. Knowing the difference between fantasy and reality does not mean that a person should disdain imaginative acts. I need to recognize when it is time to stop woolgathering and come back down to reality and work in the pebbly bedrock of the here and now.”

“The manifold of the past, present, and the future all form a single vivacious composition that only exists in the mind’s eye as separate isolated stages in a forward spooling continuum of space-time. Eternity and time are distinct qualities. Eternity is a dimension of time, an aspect framed by thinking and action. We exist in the present; we live in the element of time referred to as the here and now. We experience life in the eternity that bookends our life force. I need to realize my separate identity in eternity and at the same time actively cogitate upon my indivisible participation in the interwoven continuum of space-time.”

“I seek more than diminishing pain. I want to experience a splendid life, a life full of gaiety, charming people, beautiful panoramas, outstanding adventures, and sublime interpersonal experiences. In place of squandering personal resources and wasting valuable time, yearning to satisfying these improbable goals, I wish to learn from gross errors. I desire to cease castigating myself for prior mistakes. A realistic personal goal is striving to achieve presence of mind, demonstrate consistent attentiveness to the present, rather than continually worry about the past or the future.”

“Pain avoidance is part of life. A campaign to minimize hunger and lessen pain drives us to develop systems that will provide us with nourishing food and protective shelter. Pain is a trickster. It can send us true or false signals that confine us to our beds or spur us to roam long and far. Pain has a lifesaving function. Pain can signal us to implement evasive action or attack our problems head-on. Pain has a putative role. Pain can torture us for engaging in careless deeds. Pain performs a restorative role. Pain can tell us when we must rest. Pain is tutor and a healer. Pain implores us to take heed of our physical and mental infirmities, urges us to call out for help, and compels us to adopt modified strategies.”

“Boredom – the psychological state that we experience whenever we are uninterested in what we are currently doing – is one of the defining traits of humanity. Time is the psychological nemesis of humankind. Tedium, a fundamental angst of humankind, arises from human beings’ ability to perceive time and our attempts to derive meaning from our personal existence.”

“2. The banality of time torments us, the tedium of existence mocks us, and many minor incidences irritate human beings. While we seek to inscribe a personal place in a finite realm, we live in a world without any actual boarders known as the universe. Human wastefulness, suffering, and cruelty know no bounds. Irrespective of all the unfortunate occasions in life that prove painful, stressful, sorrowful, or dreary, all misfortunate setbacks along with the shattering monotony of human existence are part of the vicissitudes of living a sentient life. If a person can view the enigmas of life from a detached perspective that respects life without worrying about the ultimate tragedy of all existence, when we return to the void from which we came, life will appear as a dream, a phantasm.”

“Memory is the essential cornerstone of humanity. There would be no spiritual platform for enactment of public policy directed at uplifting the poor without remembrance of our munificent traditions and customs. Without the ability to recollect the why and wherefores, there would be no tolerance or wondrous love. Without oral memories of the instructions issued by our prophets and patriarchs, there would be no reminder of their charitable calling. Memories prompt us magnanimously to provide for and protect our family, love our neighbors and enemies, and pray for unsavory souls whom persecute us. Without memories of our prior actions and omissions, there would be no confession, and no repentance. Without memories of our personal transgressions, there would be no tolerance for other people. Without memories of heroic action of our predecessors, there would be no sterling examples to exemplify and guide honorable human behavior. Memories are what we rely upon to understand what it means to be human. Shared memories of affection and kindness and recollections of selfless acts fuse the ties of families. Collective memories establish community culture.”

“Deprived of all forms of memory, people would act only to satiate the immediacy of their base cravings. Without past memories acting as guidepost, humankind’s dynamics diminish to the entropy of commission and reaction. The desire to achieve lastingness would be frivolous without appreciation of our joint history. In absence of historical awareness, there could be no culture dialogue or community inwardness. Absent historical awareness, there would be no evolving community consciousness and there would be no social engine capable of generating any communities’ battery of self-determinacy. Self-improvement would be frivolous without forging an intimate relationship with our historiology as well as familiarity with the account of select people’s exhibited character traits that we might wish to emulate. Notions of personal pliancy and individual lability would lose its root structure without the prongs of memory to provide the necessary griddle and supporting trusses to configure and provide cohesion for our developing sense of selfhood.”

“Without the aid of memory, human cognition would be nil. Without memory, there can be no thinking, no learning, no accumulation of shared knowledge, and no philosophy. Thinking requires the capacity to recall. Thinking is what enables human beings the ability to understand cause and effect, recognize patterns of significance, comprehend the unique context of experience, measure personal activities, and respond to the world in a meaningful way. Knowledge is memory based. Learning demands the acquisition of studious observations and learned information, the ability to recall a slew of previously held factoids on command, and logically and intuitively to extrapolate from such objective facts. Without memory, there could be no morality. Awareness of humankind’s ineluctable sense of impermanence requires the ability to comprehend times passage through use of stored memories. Without the epic sense of being that memory supplies us, there would be no understanding of eternity, we would remain ignorant of the unremitting thump of time, and therefore, we would be forever unaware of humankind’s wretched transience.”

“People undergo several sequential steps in maturing from infancy including childhood, adolescences, young adulthood, middle age, and old age. Each stage presents distinct challenges that require a person to amend how they think and act. The motive for seeking significant change in a person’s manner of perceiving the world and behaving vary. Alteration of person’s mindset can commence with a growing sense of awareness that a person is dissatisfied with an aspect of his or her life, which cause a person consciously to consider amending their lifestyle.”

“All roads in this mystical world tragically lead to death. Every personal narrative repeats the same rhetorical trope. Memento mori (‘remember that you must die’) and memento mortis (‘remember death’) are the Latin medieval designation of the theory and practice of reflecting on mortality, pondering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits. The title to metaphysical poet John Donne’s poem Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris (‘Now, this Bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.’) expresses this sentiment of humankind’s painful morality and the interconnectedness of humanity. Remember death – that I must die – is my faithful traveling companion.”

“A person’s perception on the existence of free will affects how they perceive reality. Rather than exercising any resistance against the inevitability of the future, philosophical pessimists resign themselves to accept whatever will happen. I do believe in limited free will, in part, because I am unwilling to accept that the choices we make and our hard work to accomplish personal goals is a silly frivolity. The universe is conceivably an unstable entity subject to random events and chance encounters producing unexpected and unanticipated events.”

“Life is too short for fearmongering and becoming ensnarled in lengthy periods of depression. We must use our time judiciously and never waver in our scared quest striving to achieve what one seeks. A person whom encounters no difficulties along the way, or only finds relatively minor troubles, probably does not want much out of life. When times are too tame, it is probable that we allowed a certain pall of inertia to set in. One cannot sail on a meek wind. When life is too tranquil, we should be suspicious of our charted designation. When life is too calm, it is possible that we will shortly run aground. When we experience no resistance in our path, we probably did not depart on a worthwhile journey in the first place. One must act diligently to scout out a meaningful destination. I must rest when tired, but I can never become complacent and snooze through life. I can never surrender what I seek. Striving means a willingness to make mistakes in good faith and to continue to go on undeterred by past mistakes. Any motivated person is bound to make mistakes pursing challenging goals and occasionally fall short of his or her intended short-term or midrange mark. In order to achieve worthy long-term goals, person must exhibit mental flexibility and adapt to every obstacle blocking their path.”

“American culture has regressed because of contemporary society’s glorification of making a good living and spending free time in media activities rather than constantly devoting themselves to a learning and self-improvement. The combination of grooming youngsters to fit into a commercial workplace and Americans willingness to submit themselves to endless hours of watching television shows filled with murders, violence, sex, and replete with advertisements that promote the goods of commercial giants has eroded the American spirit and contributed to lack of an intellectually sophisticated populous.”