Quotes from Stephen Cope

Late in the afternoon" Solomon, Beethoven

Precise acts and feelings and decisions were infinitely more effective than the blundering idiocy I called my life. —Carlos Castaneda Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan

Alessandra Comini. The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking. Sunstone: Santa Fe, NM, 2008

Edmund Morris. Beethoven: The Universal Composer. HarperCollins: New York, 2005

Barry Cooper. Beethoven. Oxford University Press: USA, 2008

It is, therefore, a very great thing to be little, which is to say: to be ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are.

The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity." Frost found the experience exhilarating.

He declared that it was his love for poetry—and his ambition to write great poetry—that had compelled his self-training. "To love poetry is to study it," he said to Ward. (Frost became one of America's greatest autodidacts.)

Maynard Solomon. Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination. University of California Press: Berkeley, 2004

Blessed is the man who, having subdued all his passions, performeth with his active faculties all the functions of life, unconcerned about the event Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Be not one whose motive for action is the hope of reward. Perform thy duty, abandon all thought of the consequence, and make the event equal, whether it terminate in good or evil; for such an equality is called yoga.

Marion Woodman. The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation. Inner City: Toronto, 1997

After termination with her analyst in London, Marion would henceforth let her life be guided by an ongoing analysis of her own dream world. "Once we know what the dream world is," she writes, "to be without it is to be rudderless. The dream continually corrects our waking course." Marion, like Jung, came to believe that dreams are the path—circular and meandering as it is—to a knowledge of the exiled self.

Marion Woodman. Rolling Away the Stone. Sounds True Recordings: Boulder, CO, 1989.

Marion Woodman. Bone: A Journal of Wisdom, Strength and Healing. Penguin Putnam: New York, 2000, p. 15.

Intensive practice provided Beethoven with the tools to symbolically and energetically transform his experience. It gave him an increasing experience of self-efficacy and self-esteem, and provided him with an experience of fun. Finally, it came to provide him with a profound sense of purpose, accomplishment, and meaning. It turns out that these qualities of dharma can rescue even a life in peril.

See the world as your self. Have faith in the way things are. Love the world as your self; Then you can care for all things.

Stuart M. Sperry. Keats the Poet. Princeton University Press; Princeton, NJ, 1993

It's a wonderful phrase. Gandhi's meaning was simple: Only the human being who acts in a way that is empty of self can be the instrument of Soul Force. And it is only Soul Force that can establish a harmonious world. Human beings alone are helpless to resolve conflicts without it.

Marion discovered an underlying theme in her clients' dreams. She discovered that her addicted clients lived divided lives—lives split between body and soul, between perfection and imperfection, between light and dark. Healing came about through integrating these "pairs of opposites." She came into an understanding of the way in which longing for our idealized images of life separates us from our true selves and from our true callings.

In itself, the apparently dualistic nature of our phenomenal world is not a problem. We can live with hot and cold, love and hate, gain a loss, light and shadow, sacred and profane. The problem is that we human beings inevitably tend to choose for one side of the polarity and against the other side, artificially attempting to split life down the middle.

Gerald B. Kauvar. The Other Poetry of Keats. Associated University Press: Cranbury, New Jersey, 1969

In his late teens, and probably as a result of Neefe's coaching, Beethoven began to read widely and voraciously. This is when he began to frame his life as a quest to

But ahimsa is more than just the absence of violence: It is the presence of justice and of love. Gandhi always made it perfectly clear that "the satyagrahi's object is to convert, not to coerce, the wrongdoer.

No matter how painful the truth may be, it's usually a relief to acknowledge it.