Quotes

Birth and death are only doors through which we pass,
Sacred thresholds on our journey.
Birth and death are a game of hide-and-seek.
- Thich Nhat Hanh

If you can change the situation, there is no need to be unhappy. If you cannot change the situation, then there is no use in being unhappy.
- Shantideva, quoted by Lama Ringu Tulku, Mind Training

We die, and we do not die.
- Shunryu Suzuki

I have decided to reject everything that, directly or indirectly, makes people die or justifies others in making them die.
- Tarrou, in La Peste by Albert Camus

Using speech
Or written words
To gain the praise of others
Is something most repulsive
- Wang Ming, Calming the Mind, interpreted by Sheng Yen

If not for appearances, the world would be a perfect crime, which is to say, without criminal, without victim and without motive … Happily, reality doesn’t take place. Thankfully, the crime is never perfect.
- Jean Baudrillard

Revolutionaries and reformers all make the same mistake. Lacking the power to master and reform their own attitudes towards life, which is everything, or their own being, which is almost everything, they escape into wanting to change others and the external world. Every revolutionary, every reformer, is an escapee.
- Fernando Pessoa

Training for freedom in life is the basis for freedom in dreaming and dying.
- Rob Nairn, Living Dreaming Dying

Nonviolence belongs to a continuum from the personal to the global, and from the global to the personal. One of the most significant Buddhist interpretations of nonviolence concerns the application of this ideal to daily life. Nonviolence is not some exalted regimen that can be practiced only by a monk or a master; it also pertains to the way one interacts with a child, vacuums a carpet, or waits in line. Besides the more obvious forms of violence, whenever we separate ourselves from a given situation (for example, through inattentiveness, negative judgments, or impatience), we kill something valuable. However subtle it may be, such violence actually leaves victims in its wake: people, things, one’s own composure, the moment itself. According to the Buddhist reckoning, these small-scale incidences of violence accumulate relentlessly, are multiplied on a social level, and become a source of the large-scale violence that can sweep down upon us so suddenly. One need not wait until war is declared and bullets are flying to work for peace, Buddhism teaches. A more constant and equally urgent battle must be waged each day against the forces of one’s own anger, carelessness and self-absorption.

- Kenneth Kraft, Inner Peace, World Peace
from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith, a Tricycle book