User:Goethean/Quotations

"...that article of faith among Brahmans that God’s all merciful power would not have permitted such a number of different religions if He had not found pleasure in beholding their varieties"

--Nathaniel B Halhed, Code of Gentoo Laws or Ordinances of the Pundits from a Persian translation made from the Original written in the Shanscrit language, London, 1775, p xlviii.

"...we should give unity to our lives by devoting them with hearty enthusiasm to some pursuit, and that the pursuit is assigned to us by Nature through the capacities she has given us."

—Sir J. R. Seeley "On Goethe"

Herbst 1880 6[206] (KSA 9, 252): Ich rede nicht zu den Schwachen: diese wollen gehorchen und stürzen überall auf die Sklaverei los. Wir fühlen uns Angesichts der unerbittlichen Natur immer noch selber als unerbittliche Natur!— Aber ich habe die Kraft gefunden, wo man sie nicht sucht, in einfachen milden und gefälligen M[enschen] ohne den geringsten Hang zum Herrschen—und umgekehrt ist mir der Hang zum Herrschen oft als ein inneres Merkmal von Schwäche erschienen: sie fürchten ihre Sklavenseele und werfen ihr einen Königsmantel um (sie werden zuletzt doch die Sklaven ihrer Anhänger, ihres Rufs usw.) Die mächtigen N[aturen] herrschen, es ist eine Nothwendigkeit, sie werden keinen Finger rühren. Und wenn sie bei Lebzeiten in einem Gartenhaus sich vergraben!

Fall 1880 6[206]:

I do not speak to the weak: they want to obey and generally lapse into slavery quickly. In the face of merciless nature, let us still feel ourselves as merciless nature! But I have found strength where one does not look for it: in simple, mild, and pleasant p[eople], without the least desire to rule—and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared to me a sign of inward weakness: they fear their own slave soul and shroud it in a royal cloak (in the end, they still become the slaves of their followers, their fame, etc.). The powerful n[atures] dominate, it is a necessity, they need not lift one finger. Even if, during their lifetime, they bury themselves in a garden house!

--Nietzsche, Nachlass

Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual property is to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.

--David Mertz

Satori is reality conscious of itself.
 * --paraphrase of an idea of D. T. Suzuki

Live up to the Light thou hast, and more will be granted thee.


 * --Caroline Fox (1819–1871)

"Nirvana fully realized is samsara rightly understood"


 * --Nagarjuna

The entire purpose for existence is to re-experience the awesomeness of the Self that we are individually a part of – through learning, evolution, and transition – and to facilitate the experience in others.


 * --Meera Francois

What the soul sees and has experienced, that it knows; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.


 * --Sri Aurobindo

The one aim of yoga is an inner self-development by which each one who follows it can in time discover the One Self in all and evolve a higher consciousness than the mental, a spiritual and supramental consciousness which will transform and divinize human nature.


 * --Aurobindo

In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic.


 * --G. K. Chesterton


 * You cracked that void,
 * and let it leak
 * just a pervert
 * playing hide and seek.
 * Who wandered off from home,
 * and ate the map,
 * now you beg yourself,
 * to take you back.
 * Spitting out white noise,
 * digging those black holes,
 * just shove that shovel
 * into what unfolds
 * it's but a laugh attack,
 * about the fact it never happened.


 * --Stuart Davis

God is only experiencing itself.


 * --Nisargadatta Maharaj

Truth is a pathless land.


 * --Krishnamurti

In the beginning was neither being nor non-being.


 * -Rig Veda

By your stumblings, the world is perfected.


 * --Sri Aurobindo

God is the breath inside the breath.


 * --Kabir

Silence is the only real activity.


 * --Ramana Maharshi

The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for the deliverance from fear. It is the storm within that endangers him, not the storm without.


 * --Ralph Waldo Emerson

To conquer the subtle passions seems to be harder far than the physical conquest of the world by the force of arms.


 * --Mahatma Gandhi

Man is God in search of Himself.


 * --Meera Francois

Always recognize the dreamlike qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion. Practice good-heartedness toward all beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to you. What they will do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream. The trick is to have positive intention during the dream. This is the essential point. This is true spirituality.


 * --Chakdud Tulku Rinpoche

Jiva is Shiva.


 * --Swami Vivekananda

One only ceases to be absurd when, realizing that everything is absurd when seen in isolation from everything else, meaning and value are sought only in wholeness. One must, therefore, return to the heart of life and oneness, losing himself, not in the massive illusion, but simply in the root reality, plunging through the center of his own nothingness, and coming out in the All which is the Void and which is, if you like, the Love of God.


 * --Thomas Merton

Religion is not in dogma, in doctrines, nor in intellectual argumentation. It is being and becoming; it is realization.


 * --Swami Vivekananda

All means are held good to catch a single beam, Eternity sacrificed for a moment's bliss: Yet for joy and not for sorrow earth was made And not as a dream in endless suffering Time. Although God made the world for his delight, An ignorant Power took charge and seemed his Will And Death's deep falsity has mastered Life. All grew a play of Chance simulating Fate.


 * --Aurobindo, Savitri, Book X, Canto III