Robert Thurman famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

People are afraid that if they let go of their anger and righteousness and wrath, and look at their own feelings-and even see the good in a bad person-they're going to lose the energy they need to do something about the problem. But actually you get more strength and energy by operating from a place of love and concern. You can be just as tough, but more effectively tough.
-- Robert Thurman

#Letting Go #Wrath #People
To become enlightened is not just to slip into some disconnected euphoria, an oceanic feeling of mystic oneness apart from ordinary reality. It is not even to come up with a solution, a sort of formula to control reality. Rather, it is an experience of release from all compulsions and sufferings, combined with a precise awareness of any relevent subject of knowledge. Having attained enlightenment one knows everything that matters, and the precise nature of all that is.
-- Robert Thurman

#Knowledge #Reality #Oneness
To finish building the free society dreamed of by Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, we must draw upon the resources of the enlightened imagination, which can be systematically developed by the spiritual sciences of India and Tibet. We have not yet tamed our own demons of racism, nationalism, sexism, and materialism. We have not yet made peace with a land we took by force and have only partly paid for. We are a teeming conglomeration of people from different tribes who have yet to embrace fully the humanness in one another. And none of us can be really free until all of us are.
-- Robert Thurman

#Spiritual #Land #People
Live fully each day to the full . . .
-- Robert Thurman

#Each Day
Within our own society, we jail more prisoners than any other country in the world, 85 percent of them people of nonwhite races â€” red, black, brown, and yellow. We are one of the few nations that still indulge in the death penalty for increasing numbers of these prisoners. We must become mindful of these negative things, since we need not support these actions of our nation to be affected negatively by their evolutionary impact, unless we mentally, verbally, and ultimately physically, disassociate ourselves from them.
-- Robert Thurman

#Country #Race #Yellow
I am daily making myself what I am.
-- Robert Thurman

#Self
The Buddhists think that, because we've all had infinite previous lives, we've all been each other's relatives. Therefore all of you, in the Buddhist view, in some previous life ... have been my mother - for which I do apologize for the trouble I caused you.
-- Robert Thurman

#God #Mother #Buddhist
Imagine a culture in which everything is geared toward helping all individuals become the best human beings they can be; in which individuals are driven to devoting their lives to becoming enlightened by the natural flood of compassion for others that arises from their wisdom.
-- Robert Thurman

#Compassion #Culture #Becoming
You should never be ashamed of the suffering you've been through.
-- Robert Thurman

#Suffering #Should #Ashamed
Wisdom is tolerance of cognitive dissonance.
-- Robert Thurman

#Tolerance #Cognitive Dissonance #Dissonance
Enlightenment is not meant to be an object of religious faith. It is an evolutionary goal, something we want to become...
-- Robert Thurman

#God #Religious #Goal
Whether or not enlightenment is a plausible goal for us is a vital question for our lives. If it is possible for us to attain such perfect enlightenment ourselves, our whole sense of meaning and our place in the universe immediately changes. To be open to the possibility is to be a spiritual seeker, no matter what our religion. Enlightenment is not meant to be an object of religious faith. It is an evolutionary goal...
-- Robert Thurman

#Spiritual #Religious #Perfect
When all is lost, when all is let go of, when all is abandoned, what you are left with is an ocean of bliss.
-- Robert Thurman

#Letting Go #Ocean #Bliss
The worldly person is insane from the point of view of the spiritual person.
-- Robert Thurman

#Spiritual #Views #Insane
Nonviolence against humans cannot take firm hold in society as long as brutality and violence are practiced toward other animals.
-- Robert Thurman

#Animal #Long #Brutality
More than whether you live or die, it's how you are living or dying that is important.
-- Robert Thurman

#Important #Dying
Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the greatest teachers of our time. He reaches from the heights of insight down to the deepest places of the absolutely ordinary.
-- Robert Thurman

#Teacher #Height #Ordinary
When all is lost, when all is let go of, when all is abandoned what you are left with is an ocean of bliss. Â What you emerged with what you are is an ocean of bliss. Â Your cells and atoms and brain and bones and blood stream all of it is bliss.
-- Robert Thurman

#Letting Go #Ocean #Cells
Buddhism is all about science. If science is the systematic pursuit of the accurate knowledge of reality, then science is Buddhism, Buddhism is science.
-- Robert Thurman

#Buddhism #Reality #Systematic
It took me forty years of dealing with buddhism to finally realize that actually Buddha's discovery was happiness and bliss.
-- Robert Thurman

#Buddhism #Discovery #Years
In the practice of exchanging self & other, paradoxes abound.
-- Robert Thurman

#Practice #Self #Meditation
The tradition of nonviolence, optimism, concern for the individual, and unconditional compassion that developed in Tibet is the culmination of a slow inner revolution, a cool one, hard to see, that began 2,500 years ago with the Buddha's insight about the end of suffering. What I have learned from these people has forever changed my life, and I believe their culture contains an inner science particularly relevant to the difficult time in which we live.
-- Robert Thurman

#Believe #Compassion #Years
Practice giving things away, not just things you don't care about, but things you do like. Remember, it is not the size of a gift, it is its quality and the amount of mental attachment you overcome that count. So don't bankrupt yourself on a momentary positive impulse, only to regret it later. Give thought to giving. Give small things, carefully, and observe the mental processes going along with the act of releasing the little thing you liked.
-- Robert Thurman

#Regret #Attachment #Practice
Those caught in the cycle of self-concern suffer helplessly, while the compassionate are more free and, implicitly, more happy.
-- Robert Thurman

#Motivation #Inspiration #Self
Commercial interests with their advertising industry do not want people to develop contentment and less greed. Military interests in economic, political, ethnic or nationalist guises, do not want people to develop more tolerance, nonviolence and compassion. And ruling groups in general, in whatever sort of hierarchy do not want the ruled to become too insightful, too independent, too creative on their own, as the danger is that they will become insubordinate, rebellious, and unproductive in their alloted tasks.
-- Robert Thurman

#Military #Independent #Compassion

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