Taskmaster Quotes

Urgency is a grim taskmaster.
Escape time, and life becomes irie.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
("Irie" is a Jamaican word for being at total peace
with your current state of being.)

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
- Lao Tzu

No good comes from hurrying.
- Yiddish Proverb

To say "too busy" is merely
to say "confused priorities."
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

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Thank you for joining me on this journey we call life,
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Who forces time is pushed back by time;
who yields to time finds time on his side.
- The Talmud

Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit.
Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever,
even if your whole world seems upset.
- Saint Francis de Sales

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste
that they hurry past it.
- Soren Kierkegaard

A sloth lives a pretty good life, s-l-o-w-l-y.
Maybe we have something to learn from him.
Some days, being sloth-like may be just what you need
to avoid being consumed by urgency.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

When you feel the need to hurry,
remember that everything in life is a CHOICE.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Necessity never made a good bargain.
- Benjamin Franklin

You will never find time for anything.
If you want time you must make it.
- Charles Buxton

NECESSITY and URGENCY are twin poisons of our rattlesnake minds.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Urgent? Why?
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

We disrespect ourselves and our free-will
whenever we say that we NEED to do something.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

I choose never to be a prisoner of urgency.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Okay, so it's a matter of life and death - now are you happy?
Urgency is never a path to joy.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Affirmation:
"I choose never to be a prisoner of urgency."
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Time is carnivorous.
Urgency rips the peaceful flesh from our bones.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

We are composed of self-contradictions.
Each of us is loving in some moments - hateful in others.
Patient and calm sometimes - harried by urgency at others.
Understanding - and self-absorbed.
Reassuring - and sarcastic.
Generous - and greedy.
Trusting - and jealous.
Comforting - and snappish.
Original - and stuck in a rut.
Thankful - and needy.
Forgiving - and vengeful.
Nurturing ourself - and stuffing ourself with fast food.
Honoring our bodies - and overstressing.
Being Joyful - and Suffering.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is sanctuary in being alone with nature.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Flowers are Nature's messengers -
reminders of an unspeakable beauty.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy
is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet,
alone with the heavens, nature and God.
Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be.
- Anne Frank

Nothing is evil which is according to nature.
- Marcus Aurelius

In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans.
- Khalil Gibran

Pay attention to rainbows, and snowflakes,
butterflies and the songs of birds,
the crash of storm-driven waves
and the mirror-surface of a quiet pond.
Let the depths of nature become a part of your innermost being.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The fog unrolls itself to be a prayer rug to the mountains.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

He is richest who is content with the least,
for content is the wealth of nature.
- Socrates

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
- Oscar Wilde

Trees are the earth's endless effort
to speak to the listening heaven.
- Rabindranath Tagore

That sense of sacredness,
that thinking in generations,
must begin with reverence for this earth.
- Paul Tsongas

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread,
places to play in and pray in,
where nature may heal and cheer
and give strength to the body and soul.
- John Muir

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Being part of the natural world reminds me
that innocence isn't ever lost completely;
we just need to maintain our goodness to regain it.
- Jewel

Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
- Anne Frank

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me,
that man with all his noble qualities...
still bears in his bodily frame
the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
- Charles Darwin

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.
- John Muir

Joy in looking and comprehending
is nature's most beautiful gift.
- Albert Einstein

The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
- Henry David Thoreau

Pause to appreciate the beauty around you.
Whether rainbow or butterfly,
mountain or tree, painting or poem -
whether crafted by nature or by a human hand -
beauty adds a magical element to life
that surpasses logic and science.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

If the misery of the poor be caused
not by the laws of nature,
but by our institutions,
great is our sin.
- Charles Darwin

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
- Frank Lloyd Wright

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening
our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures
and the whole of nature and its beauty.
- Albert Einstein

The future has nothing in common with the past -
except natural laws and human nature.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction
because of the variety of factors in operation,
not because of any lack of order in nature.
- Albert Einstein

Nature is my manifestation of God.
I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work.
- Frank Lloyd Wright

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language
that can transcend political or social boundaries.
- Jimmy Carter

Let us honor all children,
and put ourselves into service
preparing a magnificent
earthly home for future generations.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Nature never breaks her own laws.
- Leonardo da Vinci

Water is the driving force of all nature.
- Leonardo da Vinci

There are moments when all anxiety
and stated toil are becalmed
in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.
- Henry David Thoreau

Nature and human life are as various
as our several constitutions.
Who shall say what prospect life offers to another?
- Henry David Thoreau

Take a course in good water and air;
and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own.
Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.
- John Muir

The function of prayer is not to influence God,
but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
- Soren Kierkegaard

The primal rhythmic power
and resonant sound of waves on the shore
are like the earth's heartbeat,
and become our connection with the body of nature.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.
- Alfred Lord Tennyson

To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing.
None is excluded, but excludes himself.
You have only to push aside the curtain.
- Henry David Thoreau

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
- William Shakespeare

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent
of what nature has revealed to us.
- Albert Einstein

I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it.
I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every blade of grass has an angel
that bends over it and whispers, "grow! grow!
- Talmud

Treat the earth well.
It was not given to you by your parents,
it was loaned to you by your children.
We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors,
we borrow it from our Children.
- Native American traditional

What a book a devil's chaplain might write
on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low,
and horribly cruel work of nature!
- Charles Darwin

Keep close to Nature's heart...
and break clear away, once in awhile,
and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods.
Wash your spirit clean.
- John Muir

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.
- Francis Bacon

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station,
through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.
- George Washington Carver

Nature will bear the closest inspection.
She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf,
and take an insect view of its plain.
- Henry David Thoreau

Nature is not human hearted.
- Lao Tzu

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed,
but nature does not depend on us.
We are not the only experiment.
- R. Buckminster Fuller

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May the world be kind to you, and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie