Gautama Buddha Quotes

“Meditate, Ānanda, do not delay, or else you will regret it later. This is our instruction to you.”

“Meditate, Ānanda, do not delay, or else you will regret it later. This is our instruction to you.”

“Those who think of their house as only a ‘machine to live in’ should judge their point of view by that Neolithic man, who also lived in a house, but a house that embodied a cosmology.”

“What we see in a democracy governed by “representatives” is not a government “for the people” but an organized conflict of interests that only results in the setting up of unstable balances of power.”

“Animosity does not eradicate animosity. Only by loving kindness is animosity dissolved. This law is ancient and eternal. (attributed to Buddha)”

“What I have sought is to understand what has been said.”

“The dull pulse-like beat started at eleven o’clock at night. It was a new kind of music called ‘rap’. It baffled Ananda even more than disco. He had puzzled and puzzled over why people would want to listen and even move their bodies to an angry, insistent onrush of words – words that rhymed, apparently, but had no echo or afterlife. It was as if they were an extension of the body: never had words sounded so alarmingly physical, and pure physicality lacks empathy, it’s machine-like.”

“To Tree’s surprise, e could still feel the blade of Univervia that was on the deer’s tongue. And the feelings that came at Tree were fast, intense and surprising. The whole blade lay languid, surrendering as the tongue mashed the strands of grass up to the roof of the doe’s mouth. Then the deer twisted the grass sideways and ground teeth into the grass. As the grass was destroyed, each cell popped and gave shots of grass life-force into the hungry deer, in little pops of ecstatic release. The whole thing happened as swiftly as a string of firecrackers going off into light and smoke, leaving behind a dull residue that gave no sense of the evanescent beauty that had been enchanting the air only moments before. Tree felt this chunk of Univervia embrace willful dissolution and then suddenly all these little pieces that had been integrated into Univervia were separated into something like ananda, the joy which powers the universe and then... then the grass was deer.”

“We can only suppose that Buddhism has been so much admired mainly for what it is not. A well known modem writer on the subject has remarked that “Buddhism in its purity ignored the existence of a God; it denied the existence of a soul; it was not so much a religion as a code of ethics”. We can understand the appeal of this on the one hand to the rationalist and on the other to the sentimentalist. Unfortunately for these, all three statements arc untrue, at least in the sense in which they are meant. It is with another Buddhism than this that we arc in sympathy and are able to agree; and that is the Buddhism of the texts as they stand.”

“Above all, man must learn once again what he is and why he was created.”

“Just tell yourself they're only stories. Pamela K. Kinney (Spectre Nightmares and Visitations)”