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“if we can maintain a stance that, no matter what the conditions, asks always, “What can I learn here?��, the times of hindrances in samādhi practice can be as genuinely valuable as the times that feel good.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“To the degree, depth, and comprehensiveness that we can realize the emptiness, the illusory nature, of phenomena, to that degree, depth, and comprehensiveness is freedom then available to us.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“Deep rest and rejuvenation of the whole being, emotional (and, at times, physical) healing, vitality, openings of the intuition, emotional strength that is yet pliable, increase in the heart’s capacity and in our availabilities to others, steadiness of energy and of commitment in creative and service work”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“If, however, we can have access to, and develop, a reservoir of profound inner well-being, it makes letting go of what is not so helpful much easier.”
― Rob Burbea, Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising

“May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness. May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. May all beings never be separate from unconditional happiness, where there is no suffering. May all beings live in great impartiality, free from attachment and aversion. —The Four Boundless Attitudes to Cultivate a Good Heart”
― Orgyen Chowang, Our Pristine Mind: A Practical Guide to Unconditional Happiness

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“Controlling people try to control people, and they do the same with God—but loving anything always means a certain giving up of control. You tend to create a God who is just like you—whereas it was supposed to be the other way around.”
― Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe

“Yes, alone we are, deeply alone, and always, in store for us, a layer of loneliness even deeper. There is nothing we can do to dispose of that. No, loneliness shouldn’t surprise us, as astonishing to experience as it may be. You can try yourself inside out, but all you are then is inside out and lonely instead of inside in and lonely. My stupid, stupid Merry dear, stupider even that your stupid father, not even blowing up buildings helps. It’s lonely if there are buildings and it’s lonely if there are buildings and it’s lonely if there are no buildings. There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness⎯not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it. The most lethal of manmade explosives can’t touch it. Stand in awe not of Communism, my idiot child, but of ordinary, everyday loneliness.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Without friends, no one would want to live, even if he had all other goods.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?”
― Chris Marker

“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything - except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound, disembodied.”
― Chris Marker

“So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“No one can lose either the past or the future - how could anyone be deprived of what he does not possess? ... It is only the present moment of which either stands to be deprived: and if this is all he has, he cannot lose what he does not have.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Life and dreams are leaves of one and the same book. The systematic reading is real life, but when the actual reading hour (the day) has come to an end, and we have the period of recreation, we often continue idly to thumb over the leaves, and turn to a page here and there without method or connexion. We sometimes turn up a page we have already read, at others one still unknown to us, but always from the same book. Such an isolated page is, of course, not connected with a consistent reading and study of the book, yet it is not so very inferior thereto, if we note that the whole of the consistent perusal begins and ends also on the spur of the moment, and can therefore be regarded merely as a larger single page.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
― Richard Rohr

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”
― André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism

“Do not forget that the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things...as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value.”
― Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

“Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed, do not squander your life.”
― ��ō�����

“Is is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.”
― Henri Poincaré

“I have nothing to say
and I am saying it
and that is poetry
as I need it.”
― John Cage

“I would prefer not to.”
― Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
― Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”
― Aristotle

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung