Thought is the greatest hindrance to love. Thought creates a division between ‘what is’ and ‘what should be,’ and on this division morality is based, but neither the moral nor the immoral know love.
The Quite Distance
Category: quotes
Looking at Oneself with Humility
Have we looked at ourselves at all?
Most of us have not, because we are proud of our experiences, knowledge, achievement, capacity, opinion. We cling to them, and there is the sense of pride in not giving up an opinion if we have formulated one, not giving up our accumulated knowledge, experience, tradition. We take pride in that, and so pride prevents us from observing ourselves. By dropping pride I can look at myself with great humility. Right? Can we do that?
~ J. Krishnamurti in Saanen, Switzerland, 1 August 1968.
Lifelong Learning
People think of education as something that they can finish. And what’s more, when they finish, it’s a rite of passage. You’re finished with school. You’re no more a child, and therefore anything that reminds you of school – reading books, having ideas, asking questions – that’s kid’s stuff. Now you’re an adult, you don’t do that sort of thing any more.
You have everybody looking forward to no longer learning, and you make them ashamed afterward of going back to learning. If you have a system of education using computers, then anyone, any age, can learn by himself, can continue to be interested. If you enjoy learning, there’s no reason why you should stop at a given age. People don’t stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age.
What’s exciting is the actual process of broadening yourself, of knowing there’s now a little extra facet of the universe you know about and can think about and can understand. It seems to me that when it’s time to die, there would be a certain pleasure in thinking that you had utilized your life well, learned as much as you could, gathered in as much as possible of the universe, and enjoyed it. There’s only this one universe and only this one lifetime to try to grasp it. And while it is inconceivable that anyone can grasp more than a tiny portion of it, at least you can do that much. What a tragedy just to pass through and get nothing out of it.
Isaac Asimov
JK
Beyond Dualities
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
Rumi
A Pale Blue Dot
The delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein
Finally managed to finish reading this book, I could only think of this quote at the moment:
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” ― Carl Sagan