Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The question is not what I should do in the future to get it, but rather, what am I presently doing that prevents me from realizing it right now?
We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.
Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.
Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible.
Don't hurry anything. Don't worry about the future. Don't worry about what progress you're making. Just be entirely content to be aware of what is.
Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.
The world is in an extremely dangerous situation, and serious diseases often require the risk of a dangerous cure like the Pasteur serum for rabies.
You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this Universe. You didn't come into this world; you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.
We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.
Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or "loyal opposition" to the culture in which it is involved.
Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.
If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.
When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.
When you really understand that you are what you see and know, you do not run around the countryside thinking, "I am all this!" There is simply all this.
The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs.
The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings, the past and the future are not as real, but rather more real than the present.
This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person.
Many people never grow up. They stay all their lives with a passionate need for external authority and guidance, pretending not to trust their own judgment.
In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering.
The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.
If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.
The truth is revealed by removing things that stand in its light, an art not unlike sculpture, in which the artist creates, not by building, but by hacking away.
There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.
But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.
The Art of Being: A state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club.
Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and our world.
What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed.
No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.
The anitya doctrine is, again, not quite the simple assertion that the world is impermanent, but rather that the more one grasps at the world, the more it changes.
And the more you become aware of the unknown self - if you become aware of it - the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is.
So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.
And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.
All I'm saying is that minerals are just a rudimentary form of consciousness whereas the other people are saying that consciousness is a complicated form of minerals.
Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated
Where-so-ever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn't make any difference - you are all of them....and when they come into being, that's you coming into being.
No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
So many people of wealth understand much more about making and saving money than about using and enjoying it. They fail to live because they are always preparing to live.
Once you've learned to think you can't stop. And an enormous number of people devote their lives to keeping their minds busy and feel extremely uncomfortable with silence.
Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone.
Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.
If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed
...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.
As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses.
What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks.
Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.
Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are.
In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.