Kilroy J. Oldster Quotes

No person is more ruthlessly cheated than someone strip-mined of his or her ability to recall the vibrancy of the past. After all, what would any person be if robbed of all sense of long-term memory? Without memories, all that any person would know about life is if he or she was hungry or thirsty, cold or hot. Without memories of the past and shredded of any illusion of a future there cannot be a frame for our existence. Without a sense of memory, we lack cognition of the very essence of our being. In absence of our memories, there can be no introspection, no ethical awareness, and no devotion, loyalty, or love.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody’s memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory, some memories are lost by the passage of time, psychological defense mechanisms screen other memories from detection, the ephemeral character of other memories are invariably to elusive to arrest with reciprocal language.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Memory is a time capsule, it records the wounds inflicted upon human consciousness.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Our most potent memories include the taste and smells of foods we enjoyed as a child in part because it reminds us of who fed us a meal.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Lacking natural equilibrium, I used writing as an illustrative means to center myself in a world filled with haziness and uncertainty. My self-drafted obituary will not bemoan death but shall celebrate life by giving heartfelt thanks for all the people that brightened actuality with their kindness, friendship, noble acts of charity, and expressions of universal goodwill. It was a privilege to exist in this wrinkle of time with many people devoted to burnishing the sharpen edges of life. The heavens blessed me with many years to discover why it is beautiful to live and die in a world where the hills and wind, the rivers and seas, stars and moon, and revealing sunlight shall persevere.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The whole of eternity is present now. We apprehend eternity through our senses and mental imagination. We can never recapture lost time. Memory allows us to taste the scintillating experience of living by recollecting our past in a series of sequential personal events and an orderly arrangement of a linked series of cultural happenings. Writing our personal story calls for us to remember the sensation of what it entails to live tactilely before losing lucidity of the mind.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We can only come to terms with our own place in the world by compassionately commiserating with the pang of longing that our brethren experience.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We nurture our own being by respecting all people and consciously working to mitigate the pain of the world.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We foster personal meaning out of life by exulting in all of nature, exhibiting a reverence for people, animals, plants, and by expressing compassion and sympathy for the entire community of life.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Every person struggles with the self to find and kindle their special radiance, which comes from cultivating kindness, charity, and love.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Unless we understand how the twists and turns of life operate to make us, we cannot comprehend who and what we are. Without self-awareness, we are blind to registering the intertexture of other people’s inner life. Gracefully enduring personal hardships expands our minds to extend sympathy and empathy for other people. By casting our personal life experiences into a supple storytelling casing, we create the translucent membrane that quarters the fusion of our flesh, nerves, blood, and bones. Self-understanding is an essential step in loving the entire world.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A person’s attitude creates the tone of his or her life. The highest expression of human dignity is to live a purposeful life devoted to principles and exhibiting compassion for other people.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Nature blessed every person with the innate capacity to express wonder and awe for the eternal world and act with a kind and unstinting soul.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

What gives a person’s brief time on this planet meaning is engaging in small acts of kindness. Bestowing an act of kindness upon other people is the greatest gift that a person will ever give to other people and such acts shall renew the gifting person. When we unreservedly accept and love our brethren, we become the ineluctable wind that vivifies the lives of other people.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Human inertia induces us to believe that our lives will never change unless we relocate.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Human migration is an important part of our ancestral story. The places we live shape us, the places we leave behind forges our history, and the places we might travel to becomes our mysterious future.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Similar to a how a flower grows incrementally, people also blossom in stages. As we age, we expand our knowledge of how the world works and how other people respond to our deeds. We also expand our language skills in order to communicate both our thoughts and feelings.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

All overt and covert emotions would shrivel without the beam of contrast and comparison to supply context and implication. We need the value of counterpoise to recognize and distinguish between similar and dissimilar concepts. How do we identify the importance of hope if we never felt despair? How do we appreciate the value of society and companionship until we experience solitude and loneliness? What would any relationship be unless draped with the boughs of thoughts and feelings, without the ongoing interaction between conscientious action and unreserved devotion, without endless empathy fused with boundless love? In the ring of time, without the verve supplied by both the real and the imaginary, life would be bland, insipid, and lackluster.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We develop our whole character from our thoughts, actions, attentive observations, and from the resolute pursuit of our inspirational dreams.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We inhabit an internal world that is subject to diversification. Every day we undergo personal transformation based upon experiences, thoughts, and feelings.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A person must move beyond guilt and unexamined thoughts and motives in order to discover a purpose for living vibrantly.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

All of our thoughts – ideas – are traceable to a sensation, an encounter with the world that leaves an impression upon the mind.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

For the philosopher, language, thought, and passion are the same. Ideas are personal to a philosopher; they express their human passion and articulate their novel ideas in language. Ideas are more than mere concepts, trifles that the philosophical mind toys with. Ideas provide both the structure and inner vitality that holds great thinkers’ conceptual structure together.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We cannot measure a person’s value to the human race by tabulating the size of his estate. We must judge each person by his or her final contribution to humanity and nature.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Embracing human frailty, fallibility, and heartbreaking aloneness is crucial for any person seeking to attain self-actualization and self-realization.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A bird with a broken wing cannot survive nor will a man with a broken spirit endure.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

In order to grow sometimes we must cease striving to meet other people’s expectations and begin establishing new goals that develop our personal potential. If we live a life to satisfy all the direct or implicit anticipations of other people, we end up living a life full of regret because we failed to develop into a complete manifestation of our being.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Life includes unforeseen incidents that prove critical to promote personal growth. Life rarely gives us what we want. We are lucky if life gives us what we need in order to fulfill the path that was in place at our birthing.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A person begins childhood with a mind that is essentially a blank slate – a tabula rasa – before receiving outside impressions. Early childhood experiences and perceptions begin the formulation of a state of conscious awareness, the infantile steps in forming a personality, developing social and emotional behavior, and acquiring practical and book knowledge. Childhood plays a critical role in forming our final version of a self-concept.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Humankind’s amazing grace is the ability to choose right from wrong, and assume personal responsibility for our conduct. With the judicious exercise of composure and appliance of self-discipline, we exceed our humble origins and blossom into a final rendering of whatever type of person we aspire to become.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A personality alters itself through a series of self-referential experiences. We are not the same as the day before. Much as a person can never set foot in exactly the same river on any given day, we are different each day. Yesterday made us, but the past cannot contain nor restrain us. We can never mentally scroll backward and be who we used to be. We must move forward in the stream of life until the day that our life force dries up and we return to dust.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing about the self to spur intellectual growth or attain a teardrop of emotional salvation is akin to a fish attempting to construct a net that will capture itself.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Each of us encounters many diverse experiences that make us grow and transform, but we seek to return to our roots, which is quietude.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The strongest principle of personal development is every person’s ability to make conscious decisions how to act and determine what purpose he or she attempts to fulfill. People with a fixed mindset believe that their basic personal qualities such as intelligence, talent, and other skills are traits that are predetermined or fixed and they ignore opportunities for personal development. A person’s growth mindset represents a belief that there are certain basic qualities that a person can cultivate through applied effort, if they exhibit a passion for learning, a resolute willingness to stretch their personality, and through fortitude make personal improvement despite experiencing initial hardships.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The choices we make in life determine human identities. A person might choose to avoid or confront their deepest night terrors. A person can elect to live carefully or rashly. A person can embrace ignorance or incessantly work to acquire knowledge of the larger world filled with people, nature, and ideas. A person can live a placid life or boldly seek out vivid encounters is a world filled with anarchy, chaos, hazards, and incomparable beauty and slender. A person can hold onto attachments and fear death or live their life as a mere witness and perceive their personal death as part of the collective story and the culmination of a life will lived. A person can employ their time in a material world to enhance personal pleasures or to develop their innate skills and strive towards attaining self-realization. A person may perceive their existence as pitiful drudgery, or live a courageously, making a statement with their wounds and scars that life is a thrilling mystery filled with longing, love, and holiness.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We each act as the creator of the self, and therefore, we strive to attain self-realization by understanding what we were in various stages of life including what we began as and what we transmuted into becoming.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We employ free will to design of our own being and therefore we must accept responsibility for our actions.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We are each a product of our biological endowments, culture, and personal history. Culture ideology and cultural events along with transmitted cultural practices influences each of us. We are each the product of our collective interchanges. Our county’s domestic and interlinked international conflicts fuse us together. We are each a molecule in the helix of human consciousness joined in a physical world. We form a coil of connective tissue soldered together by cultural links.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Liberating a prejudiced mind from its preconceived notions and scripting a life of purposefulness requires constant postulation, observation, evaluation, and synthesizing.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We are each authors of a self-concocted depiction establishing our present day identity. Our persona is woven from a range of truths interweaved with inspired imagination and occasionally bounded by convenient falsehoods. Creating our personal story generates an identity myth that allows us to carry on.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster