#his

Through recognizing and realizing the empty essence, instead of being selfish and self-centered, one feels very open and free ↗

— Tsoknyi Rinpoche

#healing #health #mindfulness #nature

There will never be slaves in Britain,' Godalming continued, 'but those who stay warm will naturally serve us, as the excellent Bessie has just served me. Have a care, lest you wind up the equivalent of some damned regimental water-bearer.' In India, I knew a water-bearer who was a better man than most. ↗

— Kim Newman

#horror #vampires #nature

Of all America’s natural resources, its richest is an inexhaustible vein of irony. ↗

— Markham Shaw Pyle

#american-history #history #nature

Rising up, rising down! History shambles on! What are we left with? A few half-shattered Greek stelae; Trotsky's eyeglasses; Gandhi's native-spun cloth, Cortes' pieces of solid gold (extorted from their original owner, Montezuma); a little heap of orange peels left on the table by the late Robespierre; John Brown's lengthily underlined letters; Lenin's bottles of invisible ink; one of Di Giovanni's suitcases, with an iron cylinder of gelignite and two glass tubes of acid inside; the Constitution of the Ku Klux Klan; a bruised ear (Napoleon pinched it with loving condescension)... And dead bodies, of course. (They sing about John Brown's body.) Memoirs, manifestoes, civil codes, trial proceedings, photographs, statues, weapons now aestheticized by that selfsame history - the sword of Frederick the Great, and God knows what else. Then dust blows out of fresh graves, and the orange peels go grey, sink, wither, rot away. Sooner or later, every murder becomes quaint. Charlemagne hanged four and a half thousand "rebels" in a single day, but he has achieved a storybook benevolence. And that's only natural: historiography begins after the orange has been sucked,; the peeler believes in the "great and beautiful things," or wants to believe; easy for us to believe likewise, since dust reduced truth and counterfeit to the same greyness - caveat emptor. But ends remain fresh, and means remain inexplicable. Rising up and rising down! And whom shall I save, and who is my enemy, and who is my neighbor? ↗

— William T. Vollmann

#meaning #memory #momentos #war #beauty

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him. ↗

— Will Durant

#commanding-nature #eternal-recurrence #history #history-repeating-itself #science

Catch on fire with enthusiasm, and people will come for miles to watch you burn ↗

— Jo Ann Butler

#historical-fiction #natural-history #nature

The Buddha-nature which is ours from the very beginning is like the sun which emerges from the clouds, or like a mirror which, when rubbed, regains its original purity and clarity. (217) ↗

— Edward Conze

#buddhism #nature

Legends should stay legends otherwise they just become history, when the natural course of things is the other way around, from history to legend. ↗

— Ian McDonald

#nature

The left-hand path adept seeks to liberate him/herself from passive subjection to the illusory nature of Maya, thus freeing the consciousness from the binds of self-created delusion. ↗

— Zeena Schreck

#jivanmukta #left-hand-path #materialism-versus-spiritualism #spiritual-transformation #nature

Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies. ↗

— Steven Johnson

#hobbies #innovation #self-improvement #nature