DhammaSeeker.com

“I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his journal (1843)

“On some level, punk and Buddhism are underpinned by a similar premise: Both acknowledge that he planet is brimming with unhappiness. The question is how you confront that misery.”
~ A.C. Thompson, writer, in Punk Planet (Nov./Dec. 2003)

“The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile…it’s the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him with his friendship.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thoughts in clear form.”
~ Albert Einstein

“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never. In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony.”
~ William Channing

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
~ Thomas Merton

“I like relativity and quantum theories because I don’t understand them and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can’t settle, refusing to sit still and be measured; and as if the atom were an impulsive thing always changing its mind.”
~ D.H. Lawrence

“The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.”
~ Albert Einstein, 1932

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest–a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
~ Albert Einstein

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow: Acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings, in destruction; meetings, in separation; births, in death. Knowing this, one should from the very first renounce acquisition and heaping-up, building and meeting, and set about realizing the Truth.”
~ Ancient Buddhist Teaching

“What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turns; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.”
~ C.S. Lewis

“What we need is imagination. We have to find a new view of the world.”
~ Richard P. Feynman

“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”
~ Albert Einstein

“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

“. . . In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental. To be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Nature

“Nobody sees a flower, really — it is so small - we haven’t time, and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”
~ Georgia O’Keefe

“Postmarks are a lot more than bureaucratic hieroglyphs. They’re symbols of a sacred trust. That package has been anointed and sealed. Like King Tut’s tomb, we open it at great personal risk.”
~ Chris “in the morning” Stevens, Northern Exposure

“The best is a matter of standards — and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.”
~ Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
creeps in this petty pace from day to day
to the last syllable of recorded time,
and all our yesterdays have lighted fools
the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage
and then is heard no more: it is a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
~ William Shakespeare
Macbeth, Act V, Scene V, lines 19-28

“Phantoms! Whenever I think I fully understand mankind’s purpose on earth, just when I foolishly imagine that I have seized upon the meaning of life … suddenly I see phantoms dancing in the shadows, mysterious phantoms performing a gavotte that says, as pointed as words, ‘What you know is nothing, little man, what you have to learn, immense.’”
~ Charles Dickens

“My country is the world and my religion is to do good.”
~ Thomas Paine

“A man’s not finished when he’s defeated; he’s finished when he quits.”
~ Richard M. Nixon

“We had the sky, up there, all sparkled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at hem, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened.”
~ Mark Twain, Huckelberry Finn

“Western civilization. That is a good idea.”
~ Ghandi

“Intellectual debts begin in obscurity and end in infinity.”
~ H.H. Kolb

“Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves.”
~ Werner Heisenberg

“In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.”
~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“The half truths of one generation tend at times to perpetuate themselves in the law as the whole truth of another, when constant repetition brings it about that qualifications, taken once for granted, are disregarded or forgotten.”
~ Justice Benjamin Cardozo

“The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact.”
~ Henry David Thoreau

“In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.”
~ Wallace Stevens, “Of the Surface of Things”

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
~ Edmund Burke