On being an eagle by Anthony de Mello

A man found an eagle's egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat on his strong golden wings. The old eagle looked up in awe. "Who's that?" he asked. "That's the eagle, the king of the birds," said his neighbour. "He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth - we're chickens." So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that's what he thought he was.

Aphorisms Fryderyk Nietzsche

“Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life.”

“Underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed.”

“We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us.”

“Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept.”

“Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.”

“The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the same good things for the first time several times.”

Aphorisms Alan Watts

"We live in the eternal NOW. When we listen to music, we do not listen to the past or the future, we listen to the spread the present. "

"There is nothing more creative than death, for it contains the whole secret of life. This means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown can not be avoided, that 'I' can not last, and that nothing is finally established. And when a man discovers it, he begins to live for the first time in his life. Holding his breath, he loses it. Letting go, he finds THIS. "