Manoj Patnaik's Website

From the unreal, lead us to the real! From darkness, lead us to light ! from death, lead us to immortality ! ~ Brihadaranyakopanishad

It is mind which gives to things their quality, their foundation and their being. Whoever speaks or acts with impure mind, him sorrows follows, as the wheel follows the steps of the ox that draws the cart. ~ Lord Buddha

He who has faith, has all, and he who lacks faith lacks all. It is faith in the name of the lod that works wonders, for faith is life and doubt is death. ~ Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.~ Mark Twain

Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine ~ Elvis Presley

We make our own fortunes and we call them fate. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

Destiny is not a matter of chance; but a matter of choice...

Since light travels faster than sound people appear bright until you hear them speak

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. ~ Henry David Thoreau

If a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking him if there's anything you can do. Think of something appropriate and do it. ~ E.W. Howe

If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other. ~ Carl Schurz

Never befriend the oppressed unless you are prepared to take on the oppressor. ~ Ogden Nash

No man is wise enough by himself. ~ Titus Maccius Plautus 250BC

The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself. ~ George Bernard Shaw

A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things, but cannot receive great ones.~ Lord Chesterfield

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Learn as if you were going to live forever. Live as if you were going to die tomorrow

Accept a finite disappointment, but never lose an infinite hope

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future ~ George Bernard Shaw

To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.There are always going to be people that hurt you so what you have to do is keep on trusting and just be more careful about who you trust next time around.May be God wants us to meet a few wrong people before meeting the right one, so that when we finally meet the person, we will know how to be grateful...

Mistakes are painful when they happen, but years later a collection of mistakes is what is called as experience. ~ Denis Waitley

Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing. ~ Oscar Wilde

A relationship is like "sand in your hand"; the more you tighten your grip not to lose it, the more it slips out of your hand...and sometimes from your life.

It is true that you cannot finish the book of life without closing its chapters. If you want to move on, then you have to leave the past as you turn the pages...It is difficult, but doable. After all, life is all about moving on and cherishing the past.

Finding the one you love is like finding your special song. The more difficult and elusive the song, the more it's cherished and enjoyed

Don't marry the person you want to live with, marry the one you cannot live without.

But the most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. And if you can find someone to love the you you love, well, that's just fabulous.

A life with love will have some thorns, but a life without love will have no roses.

A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man. - Lana Turner

Beauty is quite different from charm, beauty is what you notice in a woman, charm is when a woman notices you.

Love is blind, but marriage is a real eye opener.

A man is incomplete until he is married. After that, he is finished. - Zsa Zsa Gabor

Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they're trying to find someone who's going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take. ~ Anthony Robbins

Never Make Someone Your Priority, When You are Nothing More Than an Option to Them.

Do not be very upright in your dealings for you would see by going to the forest that straight trees are cut down while crooked ones are left standing. ~ Chanakya 350-275BC

Don't count every hour in the day. Make every hour in your day count

Life is 10% how you take it, 90% how you fake it.

The difference between genius and stupidity... ...is that genius has limits

Worry gives a small thing a big shadow

Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don't have film

Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia ~ Charles Schultz

My mother said to me, "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope." Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso. ~ Pablo Picasso

Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down. ~William Winans

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give ~Winston Churchill

Get happiness out of your work or you may never know what happiness is.

Call no man rich until he is dead

It is nice to be important but also important to be nice

I am involved in the land of a leonine and brave people, where every foot of the ground is like a well of steel, confronting my soldier. You have brought only one son into the world, but everyone in this land can be called an Alexander. ~ Alexander the Great to his mother about India.

GOD is the ever-active providence, by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run for a time and again destroyed. ~Swami Vivekananda

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries. ~ A. A. Milne

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit ~ Henry Brooks Adams.

A compromise is an agreement whereby both parties get what neither of them wanted

Eagles may soar in the clouds, but weasels never get sucked into jet engines.

Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry.

Maybe this world is another planet's hell. ~ Aldous Huxley

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us. ~Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese. ~Author Unknown

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile way and you have their shoes. ~Author Unknown

If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends? ~Author Unknown

"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity."
Dennis Ritchie

Failing to plan is planning to fail
Try and fail, but don't fail to try

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards...

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark, the real tragedy is when men are afraid of the light. ~ Plato

Kites rise highest against the wind-not with it ~ Winston Churchill.

Superstition is the religions of feeble minds ~ Edmund Burke

A small leak will sink a great ship ~ Benjamin Franklin

If you give a man more than he can do he will do it. If you only give him what he can do, he will do nothing. ~ Rudyard Kipling

THE SERENITY PRAYER

God,
Grant me the serenity;
To accept the things I cannot change;
The courage, to change the things I can;
And the wisdom, to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
As it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
If I surrender to His Will;
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life
And supremely happy with Him
Forever and ever in the next.

- Reinhold Niebuhr

Good quotes from Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach:

    “No, Jonathan, there is no such place. Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time. Heaven is being perfect.”

    “You will begin to touch Heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.”

    Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight – how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating.

    How much more there is now to living! Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there’s reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!

    The same rule holds for us now, of course: we choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing , and the next is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome”

Great lines from Life of Pi by Yann Martel

And so, in that Greek letter that looks like a shack with a corrugated tin roof, in that elusive, irrational number with which scientists try to understand the universe, I found refuge.

I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane.[...]then surely we are also permitted to doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

The truth of life is that Brahman is no different from atman, the spiritual force within us, what you might call the soul. The individual soul touches upon the world soul like a well reaches for the water table. That which sustains the universe beyond thought and language, and that which is at the core of us and struggles for expression, is the same thing. The finite within the infinite, the infinite within finite. If you ask me how Brahman and atman relate precisely, I would say in the same way the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit relate :mysteriously. [...] The paths to liberation are numerous, but the bank along the way the same, the Bank of Karma, where the liberation account of each of us is credited or debited depending on our actions.

As for Ravi, if Lord Krishna had held a cricket bat rather than a flute, if Christ had appeared more plainly to him as an umpire, if the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, had shown some notions of bowling, he might have lifted a religious eyelid, but they didn't, and so he slumbered.

"So Swamy Jesus, will you go on the hajj this year ? [...] At the rate you're going, if you go to temple on Thursday, mosque on Friday, synagogue on Saturday and church on Sunday, you only need to convert to three more religions to be on a holiday for the rest of your life."

Why do people move ? What makes them uproot and leave everything they've known for a great unknown beyond the horizon? Why climb this Mount Everest of formalities that makes you feel like a beggar ? Why enter this jungle of foreignness where everything is new, strange and difficult ? The answer is the same the world over : people move in the hope of a better life. [...] People move because of the wear and tear of anxiety. Because of the gnawing feeling that no matter how hard they work their efforts will yield nothing, that what they build up in one year will be torn down in one day by others.

Isn't it ironic, Richard Parker ? We're in hell yet still we're afraid of immortality.

Suddenly his [the tiger's] brute strength meant only moral weakness. It was nothing compared to the strength in my mind.

I had to stop hoping so much that a ship would rescue me. I should not count on outside help. Survival had to start with me. In my experience, a castaway's worst mistake is to hope too much and do too little. Survival starts by paying attention to what is close at hand and immediate. To look out with idle hope is tantamount to dreaming one's life away.

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.

I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.

Animals in the wild lead lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where the supply of fear is high and the supply of food is low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured.