Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To create souls in men, to create fine happiness and fine despair she must remain deeply proud - proud to be inviolate, proud also to be melting, to be passionate and possessed.
Conditions in the [movie] industry somehow propose the paradox: "We brought you here for your individuality but while you're here we insist that you do everything to conceal it.
It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.
When your kids are 5 or 6, they already start playing with makeup. And I was the only mother in freakin' elementary school getting called in to deal with makeup on her daughter.
New York was always more expensive than the other places, even when it was going bankrupt. In other words, in 1971, New York was expensive for someone with no money. For anyone.
Passions often produce their contraries: avarice sometimes leads to prodigality, and prodigality to avarice; we are often obstinate through weakness and daring through timidity.
The vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as poisons into that of medicines. Prudence collects and arranges them, and uses them beneficially against the ills of life.
It is oftener by the estimation of our own feelings that we exaggerate the good qualities of others than by their merit, and when we praise them we wish to attract their praise.
People fall in love more easily when they are already troubled by another emotion because we know that any intense emotional state greatly increases the risk of falling in love.
Does a population have informed consent when that population is not taught the inner workings of its monetary system, and then is drawn, all unknowing, into economic adventures?
I became very timid, very retreating. I wouldn't talk to anybody. I didn't look you in the eye. I just had that kind of personality as a kid that basically puts a target on you.
When you're going though a difficult time, forget about yourself for a while. Go do something for someone else. This is the fastest way to pull yourself out of a negative state.
We have two choices in life: One is to fulfill ourselves. The other is to take the time and energy that we would utilize in fulfilling ourselves and use it to make others happy.
Free will exists and operates outside causality. It is not hooked to karma. Free will is like a well that is on your property. You can choose to draw water from the well or not.
If your're not having a very good time with your life, its because you haven't done much for others. You may have done many things but you havent done much for those around you.
A child in the 4th grade who's just learning algebra is not imperfect. While there may be a child in the 12th grade who's much better, the child who's learning is not imperfect.
Tantra is the perception of the oneness and the perfection of all things. Not just the perception of light, but the perception of darkness, seeing God in both beauty and horror.
Advanced meditators are not even desirous of liberation anymore - that is just another attachment. There is no liberation. There is no bondage. These are just ideas of the mind.
People who are advanced meditators don't worry about liberation and self-realization; they instead are interested in the welfare of others and aiding others in their liberation.
Advance yourself by advancing others. Do not judge others. Be of service to them, but realize that you are not necessarily the instrument of perfecting and immortalizing others.
Meditation is a refocusing on symbols. It's not emptiness. We are using symbols, doorways to step from one world to another, from darkness into light, from death to immortality.
Sometimes their immediate reaction is to want to run away because they realize inwardly that the transpositions their life will go through will be remarkable, change everything.
It's as if all your past is written on the blackboard, and if we could erase it, your past would no longer exist. The way you do that - the only way you do that - is in samadhi.
All the sutras in the world are useless. All the lectures of all the teachers don't really mean anything. They are only words. They point in a direction, that is their only use.
It is not bad living in a monastery. I've done it many times in many lives. But I think you can do a better job outside the monastery, if you have the necessary component parts.
Between the creative, open and spontaneous approach to life, and the highly disciplined, pragmatic approach, there's a doorway, if you can find it - and it leads to immortality.
In most cases, energy is lost in little games of manipulation, in little struggles of will, in the attempts to possess others, to wrap them up, to delude them, to shine them on.
The world is always chaos, but we pretend that it's not because it makes us feel better. In doing so we're able to go through it in a specific manner and form: That's the tonal.
People are kept in line in society because they fear punishment. The assumption that underlies this mentality is that a human being will follow their desires without mitigation.
You've got to make a person aware of how miserable they really are and show them how happy they can be. Otherwise, why should they seek this nebulous goal called self-discovery.
All of the energy of existence is going to flow through you. You will be in thousands of planes of consciousness at once or beyond in nirvana or having a sandwich with a friend.
There was a time when you came forth from infinity, your essence that is. You've always existed, and you'll always exist. But there are different states of mind in the universe.
Trivial Pursuit means that you've got nothing going on in your life. Trivial Pursuit is more than a board game. It is the way most people live. Their lives are trivial pursuits.
There are planes that are not light. There are planes that are shadowy. But that is not our interest in meditation. We want brightness, ecstasy, brilliance beyond comprehension.
None of this has ever been or will ever be; all is an appearance, all is an illusion. Illusions are truth. All illusions are real. We say illusion, meaning that they're shadows.
True teachers of enlightenment are hard to find. The popular ones, of course, usually aren't enlightened because how could they be? They just tell people what they want to hear.
Don't worry about your future lives, past lives. Button up your shirt! Stand up straight! Go out and do something. Go out and have some fun. Be alive, change, dissolve, explode!
If the world does not shine brightly, even just the physical, sensual perception after meditation, you have not meditated. You have sat and thought of things that were not real.
You and I are both life. There's just the experience of every moment. We like to call them moments. There isn't really such a thing. There's just is-ness; there's just eternity.
There is also a reasonable tolerance: reason tolerates the reasonable. It is, however, almost tautological to call this 'tolerance' any longer, as it becomes a matter of course.
TV news is as bloody as Shakespeare but without the intelligence and the poetry. If you watch television news you know less about the world than if you drank gin out of a bottle
The leader is one who mobilizes others toward a goal shared by leaders and followers... Leaders, followers and goals make up the three equally necessary supports for leadership.
I asked many friends if Australian anti-intellectualism was still a living force and they all told me it was. If you are above average intelligence, hide this embarrassing fact.
'The Deuce' takes a look at the remarkable paradigm of capitalism and labor: where money goes and how it's routed; who has power and who doesn't; who is exploited and who's not.
In the Catholic view of things, abortion is a justice issue, not an issue of sexual morality... it is a civil rights issue, arguably the greatest civil rights issue of our time.
I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another.
We're told another large-scale terrorist attack is inevitable by those people who have committed so many resources to preventing it. They likely know what they're talking about.
In general, religious people seem to be happier than non-religious people - under various definitions of "religiosity," such as church attendance or professed spiritual beliefs.
The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe.
Las Vegas is the therapeutic ethos of our time run amok, our socio-psychological promise to ourselves to be eternally young writ large on the landscape of aging self-indulgence.