The traveller's-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator.
...it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters.
Good action and thoughts produce consequences which tend to neutralize, or put a stop to, the result of evil thoughts and actions. For as we give up the life of self (and note that, like forgiveness, repentance and humility are also special cases of giving), as we abandon what the German mystics called "the I, me, mine," we make ourselves progressively capable of receiving grace. By grace we are enabled to know reality more completely, and this knowledge of reality helps us to give up more of the life of selfhood - and so on, in a mounting spiral of illumination and regeneration.
In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent.
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible.
Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!
The flower of the present rosily blossomed.
There is no bad day that can’t be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet. This is just truth, plain and simple.
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large-This is the experience of inestimable value to everyone.
The only consistent people are the dead
Suddenly to realise that one is sitting, damned, among the other damned--it is a most disquieting experience; so disquieting thatmost of us react to it by immediately plunging more deeply into our particular damnation in the hope, generally realized, that we may be able, at least for a time, to stifle our revolutionary knowledge.
Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive.
That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.
What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?
You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.
For the first time in the history of the world, Buddhism proclaimed a salvation which each individual could gain from him or herself, in this world, during this life, without any least reference to God, or to gods either great or small.
We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.
Consider the problem of over-population. Rapidly mounting human numbers are pressing ever more heavily on natural resources. What is to be done?... The annual increase of numbers should be reduced. But how? We are given two choices -- famine, pestilence and war on the one hand, birth control on the other. Most of us choose birth control.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
When the individual feels, the community reels.
Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unshown marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves.
The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.
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