Quotes by "Kilroy J. Oldster"

Our life journey tests our physical and moral stamina. We undergo many trials before we discover the right way to live and delve the proper purpose of life.

Life is paradoxical, but it is enough for me. Ridiculous conflicts and inconsistencies admittedly congeal into what I term the self. Personal growth commences by honing in on the troubling personal issues. I am my only enemy. A radiant soul strives for self-enrichment by passionately pursuing the serious tasks and delights of living including expressing empathy for other people. I will explore the world and attempt to eliminate the perversions of my own egocentric being.

We must judge our idealistic self in the harsh daylight of our concrete deeds. It is the fragments from unanticipated moments in life – suffering, sadness, and fearfulness – when quixotically strung together that ultimately divulge us. Unexpected encounters in the world, especially when fate sideswipes us, reveal our core persona. With the residue garnered from a pastiche of unpleasant moments, we winnow out who we would prefer to be from who we actually are. Conflict, crisis, tragedy, and pathos force us to address whom we in reality contritely mushroomed into becoming.

A person’s selection of a vocation is a crucial step with significant ramification relating to their degree of financial success, personal happiness, and sense of contributing the best part of themselves – their unique talent – to the community.

We cannot judge each minor or even major vignettes of life as a final statement of our worth. The totality of our deeds comprises our final scorecard. If a person struggles in the earnest quest of accomplishing their ultimate destination, their demonstrative sincerity exhibited traveling with an open mind and displaying disciplined application of assiduous effort to improve their own self, while unselfishly avoiding harming other people provides a measure of satisfaction, even if a person fails to attain his or her ultimate visage.

American society places tremendous importance upon egocentric behavior. Americans are encouraged to set ourselves apart from the group. Whereas in some societies it is an aberration to go against the whole, Americans celebrate the individual over the group. Public schools teach American grade school children that they are the captains of their destiny. American schools and society inculcate schoolchildren to measure their level of success in terms of individual accomplishments. A winner versus loser mentality prevails in American culture. Winners are the recipients of life’s economic awards. We are taught that possessing financial wherewithal will assist us attain exalted social status. Social status in turn allows select people to wield the power of influence. The silent audience consists of the economically deprived, the societal castaways whom we are taught to shun for lacking the temperament to succeed. A strong sense of self not only helps a person survive, but American society keeps score of a person’s economic victories and defeats. Americans measure the intrinsic value of our lives and recognize other people’s status principally in terms of each person’s relative economic resources.

Every step in life is a testing ground. Some active and perceptive people never stop blossoming regardless of what experience they encounter while other people seem to wilt with the slightest provocation.

The irony of lost love is that a person discovers wisps of wisdom when addressing their bundle of pain and frayed emotions. Relationships that fan out in flames contain learning rubrics in the dying embers.

The computer agntold scale. It also paved the way for increasing reclusive conduct at work and at home. It is becoming increasingly difficult for us to foster lasting professional relationships when the world clips along at megabyte speed and coworkers occupy a private office or separate cubicle. Prior forms of face-to-face communication are rapidly becoming obsolete. The computer age allows people to participate in a vast network of electronic communication and our escalating dependence upon electronic communications will foster rapid e opened doors to mass communication at depersonalization in the workplace. Some people will be frozen out of regular social interactions and no longer enjoy an uplifting one-on-one working relationship that people instinctively crave.

Only the passage of time ultimately separates each generation. Our humanity remains stalwartly impervious to political manipulations and to the social, culture and economic tidings that each generation must etch out a living. Our sense of time past, present and future is the common denominator that each generation shares because time refuses to standstill for mere human beings. Time cannot be ignored or shunted, but must be respected for the indomitable power that its relentless pressure applies upon each of us. The unyielding power of time sneers at each of us regardless of our race, religion, creed, nationality, gender, age, or sexual orientation. Potency of time is irreducible, it is irreversible, and it is inerasable. Through the periscope of memory, we can dice snippets of time’s atoms into infinitesimal pictures of mere moments; we can harness select prized memories to build a molecular mind’s magical playhouse. The capacity of the human mind for memory enables people to preserve, retain, and subsequently recall knowledge, information, and experience. Replaying snapshots of the past enables us to comprehend the magnitude of the present and take account of the inevitability of our future.

The manner in which each person perceives time and the assigned role his or her conception of time plays in governing their life is a learned perspective. Although time by definition is incremental and precise, the passage of time feels amendable to a person’s frame of mind. Time seems to either pass to quickly or pass to slowly depending upon a person’s mood, temperament, and context. Instead of regretting the passage of time, disagreeable activities and tedium spur an aversion for the methodical pace of time. Whenever a person is stuck performing distasteful tasks, one frequently wishes that time would pass more quickly. Conversely, when we are experiencing fun or working to meet a pressing deadline, we are apt to despair that time is evaporating too rapidly.

Aloneness allows time for deliberating and intellectual studies, but ultimately every person must share their knowledge of life if they want to remain a vibrant memory after their death.

A person’s spiritual power originates from using knowledge, compassion, charity, and personal humility to break away from custom and creed.

Life is so much more than our pity version of reality where we worry about financial wealth, social status, power, and interacting with machines that provide pleasures such as cars, boats, smart phones, and television. Life is limited and ultimate reality – the realm of potential knowledge – is unlimited.

A person who does not read and never seeks to increase personal knowledge will always remain imprisoned by ignorance and unable to escape a cellblock of drudgery and despair.

Wisdom requires both a way of thinking and acquisition of a body of knowledge gained through such thinking, as well as the personal ability to apply accumulated knowledge to life.

People who possess a thirst for knowledge, are keen observers, and possess a compassionate heart, hold the requisite key for learning and sharing their knowledge with other people.

Every plant, tree, and animal is a blessing and every person has a purpose for living. Courage, curiosity, and generosity produce noble spirits. Enduring life honorably results in wisdom. Knowledge passed down from one generation to the next along with humankind's tradition of performing charitable and self-sacrificing deeds creates principled legacies for future generations to emulate.

In the world of personal development and spiritual growth, a seeker embarks on a path of self-discovery and self-improvement. A seeker desires to discover knowledge and use an enhanced level of personal awareness to alter their behavior, opinions, beliefs, and point of view in order to experience reality in a different and more wholesome manner than the prior path that lead to self-rejection.

All love is bittersweet. Love is inexplicable; it is part poetry and part masochism. Part of love is the loss of self-control because one must openly surrender their sense of an exclusive self to the manic powers of love. The personal act of surrender to a lover leaves one vulnerable to entanglement in a maze of emotions. When we fall in love, our lover’s happiness and well-being assumes the primary role in our mind, they become copilots of our souls. When we are in love for the first time, we feel what it means to become a complete person; we identify who we are by seeing our reflection in our lover’s eye; and we sense what we might become when infused with love. When our lover leaves us, we feel vexed and vacant because we recognize that they took up such a large part of what made us feel intoxicated with life. When our lover abandons us, we lose our sense of self; we temporarily cease to exist as a whole person, and we must reconstruct the shattered remnants of oneself in the wake of a love lost.