Valhalla: The Hall of Heroes

St. Francis of Assisi (1182 - October 4, 1226) "Yes, Brother Leo, there is no such thing as the body; nothing exists but the soul!" "The entire world is God's field. Plough it and then sow poverty, love, and peace. Strengthen the world that is tottering and about to fall: strengthen your souls. And elevate your hearts above wrath, ambition, and envy. Do not say: 'Me, Me!' Instead, make the self, that fierce insatiable beast, submit to God's love. This 'me' does not enter Paradise, but stands outside the gates and bellows." - quotes taken from Saint Francis by Nikos Kazanzakis

William Blake (November 28, 1757 - August 12, 1827) "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: infinite." "If a thing loves, it is infinite." "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise." "Exuberance is Beauty." "Improvement makes strait roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius." "Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd."

Italo Calvino (d. September 19, 1985) "This is the most difficult step in learning how to be dead: to become convinced that your own life is a closed whole, all in the past, to which you can add nothing and can alter none of the relationships among the various elements. Of course, those who go on living can, according to their shifting experience, introduce changes in the lives of the dead, too, giving form to what had none or what seemed to have a different form: recognizing, for example, a just rebel in someone who had been vituperated for his lawless actions, celebrating a poet or a prophet in one who had felt doomed to neurosis or delirium. But these are changes that matter mostly to the living. It is unlikely that they, the dead, will profit by them. Each individual is made up of what he has lived and the way he lived it, and no one can take this away from him. Anyone who has lived in suffering is always made of that suffering; if they try to take it away from him, he is no longer himself." Biographical Note by Calvino Calvino's Death by Gore Vidal Excerpt from Invisible Cities

Philip K. Dick (1929-1982) "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away." "It's a cardboard universe... and if you lean too hard against it, you fall through." "God can be good and terrible--not in succession--but at the same time. This is why we seek a mediator between us and him; we approach him through the mediating priest and attenuate and enclose him through the sacraments. It is for our own safety: to trap him within confines which render him safe. But now...God had escaped the confines and was transubstantiating the world; God had become free." "I've always told people that for each person there is a sentence--a series of words--which has the power to destroy him. ...I realized...that another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you're lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works. On their own, without training, individuals know how to deal out the lethal sentence, but training is required to deal out the second."

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881) "Man is a mystery. It must be unraveled, and if it takes a whole lifetime, don't say it's a waste of time. I'm preoccupied by this mystery because I want to be a human being." "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted."

Albert Einstein (March 14 1879 - April 18 1955) "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18." "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them." "Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts." "Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding."

Mohandas K. Gandhi (Oct 2, 1869 - Jan 30, 1948) is known as Mahatma (Great Soul) by the people of India. "Believe in Truth, Think Truth, and Live Truth." "Nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man." "Gandhi was inevitable. If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable. He lived, thought and acted, inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a world of peace and harmony. We may ignore Gandhi at our own risk." - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Carl Gustav Jung "As a child I felt myself to be alone, and am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible." (MDR 356) "All true things must change and only that which changes remains true."

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957) "We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the setting forth and the coming back; we die in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death! But as soon as we are born we begin the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life; we are born every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of ephemeral life is immortality! In the temporary living organism these two streams collide: (a) the ascent toward composition, toward life, toward immortality; (b) the descent toward decomposition, toward matter, toward death. Both streams well up from the depths of primordial essence. Life startles us at first; it seems somewhat beyond the law, somewhat contrary to nature, somewhat like a transitory counteraction to the dark eternal fountains; But deeper down we feel that Life is itself without beginning, an indestructible force of the Universe. Otherwise, from where did that superhuman strength come which hurls us from the unborn to the born and gives us - plants, animals, men - courage for the struggle? But both opposing forces are holy. It is our duty, therefore, to grasp that vision which can embrace and harmonize these two enormous, timeless, and indestructible forces, and with this vision to modulate our thinking and our action." - The prologue from The Saviors of God

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (January 15 1929 - April 4 1968) "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." "If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well." The King you don't see on TV

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) "The great thing and the only thing, is to adore and praise God." "What is needed is to lose ourselves completely in God; what is needed is perfect silence, supernatural silence. Pious talk has something revolting about it."

Norton I Emperor of America & Protector of Mexico (1819 - 1880) "At the pre-emptory request of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last nine years and ten months past of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself the Emperor of These United States." - September 17, 1859

Picture coming soon

Sir Henry "Hotspur" Percy (20 MAY 1364 - 21 JUL 1403) Interred: York Minster Notes: The Complete Peerage V.ix,p714. He was buried at Whitchurch, disinterred, his head sent to York, and his quarters to London, Newcastle, Bristol and Chester, and then sent to his widow. {My Famous Ancestor}

Ranier Maria Rilke (1875 - December 26, 1926) THE PANTHER His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world. As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed. Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly--. An image enters in, rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone. From The Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and tranlated by Stephen Mitchell

Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819 - March 26, 1892) "Do I contradict myself? I am vast, I contain contradictions."