<< We are all visitors to this time, this place . . . Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love . . . and then we return home. >>
----Australian Aboriginal Proverb

At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.
  — Frederick Nietzsche

<< When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.>>
------John Muir, American naturalist

"Nirvana is something within you. It is not an external reality. No god thunders down from the mountaintop. Just as the great mystics in the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths all discovered, God is within the self. God is virtually inseparable from ourselves."
~Karen Armstrong


"I distrust those who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."
~Susan B. Anthony

Heracles :
I do not believe the gods commit adultery, or bind each other in chains. I never did believe it: I never shall; nor that one god is the tyrant of the rest. If god is truly god, he is perfect, lacking nothing.
-----Euripides, Heracles,

Hercules, the first Deist?

“If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.”
~Baruch Spinoza

“The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.” --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Keep the company of those who seek the truth, and run away from those who have found it."
----Vaclav Havel, Czech President, Poet, Philosopher

“Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what’s been given." ~Chekov

<< One day the sun will shine over a humanity who acknowledge no other master than their own reason.>>
----Marquis de Condorcet, 1774
philosopher, mathematician, Deist?

He was a victim of the modernizing, but irrational, French Revolution, in which he played a large role. The Enlightenment project of rational "modernity" is still unfinished to this day.

From Franklin's autobiography, p. 66:
"...Some books against Deism fell into my hands....It happened that they wrought an effect on me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quote to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations, in short, I soon became a thorough Deist."

Men have become the tools of their tools.~ Henry David Thoreau

"A good person, even in death, is still alive." the Talmud

"I am a part of all that I have met." ~Alfred Lord Tennyson

"The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there." ~Yasutani Roshi

God is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that he is so.
~Plotinus

"I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being."

- Albert Einstein to Guy H. Raner Jr., Sept. 28, 1949

"Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form." ~Karl Marx

”There are two ways to live your life - one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle.” ~Albert Einstein