Favourite quotes from the books I have been reading recently:
LAMA ANAGARIKA GOVINDA
(from “The Way of the White Clouds”, one of my favourite books ever)
… a pilgrimage distinguishes itself from an ordinary journey by the fact that it does not follow a laid-out plan or itinerary, that it does not pursue a fixed aim or a limited purpose, but that it carries its meaning in itself, by relying on an inner urge which operates on two planes: on the physical as well as on the spiritual plane.
Just as a white summer-cloud, in harmony with heaven and earth, freely floats in the blue sky from horizon to horizon, following the breath of the atmosphere – in the same way the pilgrim abondons himself to the breath of the greater life that well up from the depths of his being and leads him beyond the farthest horizons to an aim which is already present within him, though yet hidden from his sight.
He knew that the vanity of asceticism can be as great a hindrance as the vanity of possession. (of Tomo Geshe Rimpoche)
As long as we regard ourselves superior to others or look down upon the world, we cannot make any real progress. (by Tomo Geshe Rimpoche)
In order to be conscious of the preciousness of time one should realise that any moment might be the last of this life and that the opportunity which it offers might not come again easily.
…how narrow and circumscribed our so-called civilised life is, how much we pay for the security of a sheltered life by way of freedom and real independence of thought and action.
Science is admirable in its own reals, but it is applicable as little to spiritual phenomenon as to any creative form of art. Due to our exclusive concentration upon and cultivation of our intellectual faculties we have neglected and, to a great extent, lost our psychic sensitivity.
ARISTOTLE
The man who is truly good and wise will bear with dignity whatever fortune sends, and will always make the best of his circumstances.
COLEMAN BARKS
Anything you do everyday can open into the deepest spiritual place, which is freedom.
MAGGIE BEER
My philosophy is simple – to cook from the heart, to live in harmony with the seasons.
BUDDHA
We see as we are.
As you walk and eat and travel, be where you are. Otherwise you will miss most of your life.
Simplicity brings more happiness than complexity.
(from The Teaching of Buddha)
Regardless of whether they are rich or poor, they worry about money; they suffer from poverty and they suffer from wealth. Because their lives are controlled by greed, they are never contented, never satisfied.
A life of sympathy and kindness will result in good fortune and happiness.
When people are happy and satisfied, class differences disappear, good deeds are promoted, virtues are increased, and people come to respect one another. Then everyone becomes prosperous; the weather and temperature become normal; the sun and the moon and stars shine naturally; rains and winds come timely; and all natural calamities disappear. (of people)
Resentment cannot be satisfied by resentment; it can only be removed by forgetting it.
PAUL COELHO
(from The Alchemist)
…always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering.
We have to be prepared for change, he thought, and he was grateful for the jacket’s weight and warmth.
But, most important, he was able every day to live out his dream.
To realise one’s destiny is a person’s only real obligation.
If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man.
…love never keeps a man from pursuing his Personal Legend. If he abandons that pursuit, it’s because it wasn’t true love…
Your eyes show the strength of your soul.
CONFUCIUS
He who seeks only coarse food to eat, water to drink and a bent arm for a pillow, will without looking for it find happiness to boot.
RAM DASS
In the tiniest event lies the wisdom of the entire universe, if you know how to plumb the depths of the moment.
ALEXANDRA DAVID-NEEL
(from Magic and Mystery in Tibet)
The whole universe is a mirage which exists in the mind.
Solitude, solitude! Mind and senses develop their sensibility in this contemplative life made up of continual observations and reflections. Does one become a visionary or, rather, is it not that one has been blind until then?…
…the Buddha was well aware that the majority do better to abide by the rules devised to avert the baleful effects of their ignorance and guide them along paths where no disasters are to be feared. For that very reason, the all-wise Master has established rules for the laity.
LUCIEN DEVIES
(from the Forward to Annapurna)
Man overcomes himself, affirms himself, and realizes himself in the struggle towards the summit, towards the absolute. In the extreme tension of the struggle, on the frontier of death, the universe disappears and drops away beneath us. Space, time, fear, suffering, no longer exist. Everything then becomes quite simple.
PETER DUBROVSKIS
My most productive days are when I move through the landscape with an attitude of acceptance, leaving myself open to all possibilities, rather than expecting to find anything in particular…and here lies the paradox. The more open and receptive I am to the world around me, the more intuitive is my search and the more likely I am to find the mysterious and unknowable.
BOB DYLAN
You can’t be wise and in love at the same time.
EL-GHAZALI
You possess only whatever will not be lost in a shipwreck.
TIM FLANNERY
(from The Weathermakers)
…we are the generation fated to live in the most interesting of times…
MAURICE HERZOG
(from Annapurna)
In my worst moments of anguish I seemed to discover the deep significance of existance of which till then I had been unaware.
Extraordinary happiness always finds pleasure in tears.
Let us not go ahead to search for trouble. If trouble is coming it will find us soon enough.
HERMANN HESSE
(from Siddhartha)
Wisdom is not communicable.
…there is no such thing as time.
…perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.
Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.
The world, Govinda, is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment…
During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect,…
BENJAMIN HOFF
(from The Tao of Pooh)
Enjoyment of the process is the secret that erases the myths of the Great Reward and Saving Time.
BRIAN JOHNSTON
(from Boxing with Shadows)
Still, my own hardships were perversely enjoyable…for I knew they would become the fond memories of tomorrow.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in searching for new landscapes, but in having new eyes…. For me, I hoped travelling was not so much a black line on a map, detailing the exotic places visited, as a journey into my own self, as I reconsidered my shifting perceptions and values to which my travelling had given new angles and dimensions.
BRUCE JUNEK
(from The Road of Dreams)
Sometimes the thought of death makes a mockery of my life. All the stuff I have collected… all of it will mean nothing when I am dead.
Sometimes we walk in the sunshine, other times in the shade. There are lessons in both.
OMAR KHAYYAM
Though ‘wine’ is forbidden, this is according to who drinks it,
As to how much, also with whom it is drunk.
KRISHNAMURTI
Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.
LAO-TZU
(as quoted in The Snow Leopard)
When your mind is empty like a valley or a canyon, then you will know the power of the way.
A good traveller has no fixed plan, and is not intent on arriving.
JOHAN VAN MANEM
(as quoted in The Way of the White Clouds)
The world is only a thought in the mind of God.
PETER MATTHIESSEN
(from The Snow Leopard)
When one pays attention to the present, there is great pleasure in the awareness of small things;…
The emptiness and silence of snow mountains quickly bring about the states of consciousness that occur in the mind-emptying of meditation,…
Simplicity is the whole secret of well-being.
Childhood is full of mystery and promise, and perhaps the life fear comes when all the mysteries are laid open, when what we thought we wanted is attained.
And surely this is the paradise of childres, that they are at rest in the present…
…I feel calm, and ready to accept whatever comes and therefore happy.
…the contentment of doing one thing at a time: when I take my blue tin cup into my hand, that is all I do.
…forever getting-ready-for-life instead of living it each day.
In this very breath we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us, what one lama refers to “the precision and openness and intelligence of the present”. The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention to the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life…. When I watch blue sheep, I must watch blue sheep, not be thinking about sex, danger, or the present, for this present – even while I think of it – is gone.
NICK MIDDLETON
…these traditional societies have successfully resolved the age-old conflict between man and nature, while modern social orders continue to make mistakes in their ceaseless struggle for progress.
MILAREPA
(as quoted in The Snow Leopard)
Life is short, and the time of death is uncertain; so apply yourselves to meditation
The precious pot containing my riches becomes my teacher in the very moment it breaks. This lesson on the inherent impermanence of all things is a great marvel.
PETER MOORE
(from The Wrong Way Home)
I’d seen most of the major religions, and…each was tailored to offer answers to the problems and needs of the cultures it originated from.
DERVLA MURPHY
(from Full Tilt)
The farther one travels the more one becomes aware of the extraordinary wealth of generosity and kindness that exists in the world.
…prosperity as the West knows it today and poverty on an Eastern scale are equally harmful to the Soul of Man.
…Man at his best – still in possession of the sort of liberty and dignity that we have exchanged for what it pleases us to call ‘progress’.
The collecting of souvenirs seems to be a substitute for the cheaper and richer experience of being temporarily integrated in the life of the country.
It’s a good life that teaches you how little you need to be healthy and happy.
OSHO
Love is the fragrance of a silent, peaceful, meditative heart.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
(from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
I don’t want to hurry it. That in itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it, and want to get on to other things.
EIDO ROSHI
(as quoted in The Snow Leopard)
Expect nothing.
RUMI (translated by Coleman Barks)
You kiss a beautiful mouth, and a key turns in the lock of your fear.
What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle. Your boundaries are your quest. I can explain this, but it would break the glass cover on your heart, and there’s no fixing that.
Good women are drawn to be with good men.
Give up wanting what other people have. That way you’re safe.
Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.
This moment is all there is. Death will take it away soon enough.
Whatever he’s looking for, he is that himself.
Don’t be a searcher wrapped in the importance of his quest.
Going back to a simpler self gives wisdom.
True seekers keep riding straight through, whereas big, lazy, self-worshipping geese unload their pack animals in a farmyard and say, “This is far enough.”
The feeling of joy when sudden disappointment comes…. Don’t grieve for what doesn’t come. Some things that don’t happen keep disasters from happening.
When something goes wrong, accuse yourself first.
Don’t be humble with fools. Don’t take pride into the presence of a master.
Be grateful when what seems unkind comes from a wise person.
It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I’ve gone and come back, I’ll find it at home. I will search for the Friend with all my passion and all my energy, until I learn that I don’t need to search. The real truth of existence is sealed, until after many twists and turns of the road.
There are many winds full of anger, and lust and greed. They move the rubbish around, but the solid mountain of our true nature stays where it’s always been.
“This world is a mountain. What we do is a shout. The echo comes back to us.”
“Go wherever you are drawn to go,” said the king, and dance on your way.
The mystery of spiritual emptiness may be living in a pilgrim’s heart, and yet the knowing of it may not yet be his.
A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given you.
This piece of food cannot be eated, nor this bit of wisdom found by looking. There is a secret core in everyone not even Gabriel can know by trying to know.
SAADI OF SHIRAZ
That building without a firm base: do not build it high;
Or, if you do – be afraid.
TED SIMON
(from Jupiter’s Travels)
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who ask questions and those who answer them.
…it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more frightening to contemplate them.
…to learn even to love the sorrow for the pleasure it divides,…
…to discover that pain and pleasure, since they cannot exist without each other, are really the same thing.
The vital instrument of change is detachment,…
You have only to merge with the world to know the Truth and find your Self.
It allowed me to think more calmly about the prospect of death. Unless I could do that, I thought, how could I possibly hope to appreciate without fear the pleasures of being alive.
TERRY TARNOFF
(from The Boneman of Benares)
…real life is guaranteed to disappoint all but the hardiest hearts among us.
…travel is putting yourself in impossible situations to find out who you are.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
(from Walden)
Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
…spending the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it…
Be sure that you give the poor the aid they mose need…. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them.
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.
Threre are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon. (by Damodara, i.e. Krishna)
I never found the companion so companionable as solitude.
…I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as sure as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.
…my greatest skill has been to want but little.
CHARLES WHITHAM
…we see with the soul, and not with the eyes…
WALT WHITMAN
…re-examine all you have been told at church or school or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your soul…
VANESSA WOODS
(on Sakura – cherry blossoms)
…a short life is a small price to pay for such beauty and grace.
ZEN…
(as quoted in The Snow Leopard)
No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.
ANONYMOUS
Be generous. Travel lightly. All in life is a gift. What you don’t need, give away.
