Quotes
Authors
Mark Epstein

"While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of "being," my work as a therapist has shown me that the demands of intimate life can be just as useful as meditation in moving people toward this capacity. Just as in formal meditation, intimate relationships teach us that the more we relate to each other as objects, the greater our disappointment. The trick, as in meditation, is to use this disappointment to change the way we relate."

Source : Mark Epstein (2006). “Open to Desire: The Truth About What the Buddha Taught”, p.89, Penguin

Mark Epstein

#Buddhist Quotes #Disappointment Quotes #Moving Quotes

“White is the color of decomposition. White is also no color. White is nothing. In photography, the paper is white, next comes the light, which is also white, then the shadow is created, the apparition.”

Source : Sylvia Wolf, Dieter Appelt, Wieland Schmied (1994). “Dieter Appelt”, Art Institute of Chicago
“Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.”
“The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men.”
“The more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with the deepening of your character you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life. All great artists, all great religious leaders, and all great social reformers have come out of the intensest struggles which they fought bravely, quite frequently in tears and with bleeding hearts”
“So-called real life has only once interfered with me, and it had been a far cry from what the words, lines, books had prepared me for. Fate had to do with blind seers, oracles, choruses announcing death, not with panting next to the refrigerator, fumbling with condoms, waiting in a Honda parked round the corner and surreptitious encounters in a Lisbon hotel. Only the written word exists, everything one must do oneself is without form, subject to contingency without rhyme or reason. It takes too long. And if it ends badly the metre isn't right, and there's no way to cross things out.”
“The most important thing for small businesses is getting the economy back on its feet. That - the key driver of small business activity is demand for their product, and that is what we are trying to do, getting the economy back on its feet. That's far more important than other factors.”
“We say that the sun is behind the clouds, but actually it is not the sun but the city from which we view it that is behind the clouds. If we realized that the sun is never behind the clouds we might have a different attitude toward the whole thing.”
“I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.”

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