#ten

People who repeatedly attack your confidence and self-esteem are quite aware of your potential, even if you are not. ↗

— Wayne Gerard Trotman

#bullying #confidence #potential #put-downs #quotable

Too lazy to be ambitious, I let the world take care of itself. Ten days' worth of rice in my bag; a bundle of twigs by the fireplace. Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment? Listening to the night rain on my roof, I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out. ↗

— Ryokan

#buddhist #hermit #japan #japanese #monk

At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal's behavior is embedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people tell him to do (totalitarianism). ↗

— Viktor E. Frankl

#conformity

For the briefest moment, they came face to face. Their eyes locked. Then he broke the stare, swiveled, sank into a sitting position, chains clanking, with his knees up. She watched him speechlessly as he set a cooler bag between his boots, like he was settling down to a picnic or something. An image of the contents as hospital blood bags, complete with juice straws, flashed through her mind. Unfolding her legs, she made herself as comfortable as she could on the cold outer edge of the sill. An intangible and unnameable charge electrified the space between them, and at first, neither of them said anything. [...] Finally she heard him unzip the bag and watched him pull out a small cylinder. "I thought you might like some crappy ice cream," he said. ↗

— Kelly Creagh

#roof-picnic #varen #contentment

Karma, simply put, is an action for an action ... good or bad. ↗

— Stephen Richards

#cause-and-effect #deed #elightenment #good-source #karma

Nobody sane wants to disappoint himself intentionally. ↗

— Toba Beta

#sanity #unintentional #sanity

A little girl's fantasies are one thing, and literature is another; just as numbers require rules to give them human meaning, words, too, demand a form to turn them into literature. ↗

— Benjamin Moser

#form #biography

In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which is created must, sooner or later, die. If enlightenment were created in such a way, there would always be a possibility of ego reasserting itself, causing a return to the confused state. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it. ↗

— Chögyam Trungpa

#confusion #discovery #enlightenment #philosophy #self-discovery

If you run out of ideas follow the road; you'll get there ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#misattributed-to-poe #persistence #persistence

It is better to take many small steps in the right direction than to make a great leap forward only to stumble backward. ↗

— Louis Sachar

#persistence #persistence