James B > James's Quotes

“After experience had taught me that all things which frequently take place in ordinary life are vain and futile, and
when I saw that all the things I feared, and which feared me, had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was affected by them; I determined at last to inquire whether
there was anything which might be truly good, and able to communicate its goodness, and by which the mind might be affected to the exclusion of all other things; I determined, I say, to inquire whether I might discover and attain the
faculty of enjoying throughout eternity continual supreme happiness..
I could see the many advantages acquired from honor and riches, and that I should be debarred from acquiring these things if I wished seriously to investigate a new matter…But the more one possesses of either of them, the more the pleasure is increased, and the more one is in con-
sequence encouraged to increase them; whereas if at any time our hope is frustrated, there arises in us the deepest pain. Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it we
must direct our lives in such a way as to please the fancy of men, avoiding what they dislike and seeking what pleases
them. . .. But the love towards a thing eternal and infinite alone feeds the mind with a pleasure secure from all pain… The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the
mind has with the whole of nature….The more the mind knows, the better it understands its forces and the order of
nature; the more it understands its forces or strength, the better it will be able to direct itself and lay down the rules for itself; and the more it understands the order of nature,
the more easily it will be able to liberate itself from useless things; this is the whole method.”
― Baruch Spinoza

“When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o' clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“We have art in order not to die of the truth.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“But the same intellect can be sharpened if you allow it to soak in the other aspect of your mind—your awareness, chitta. If you want to reach your ultimate nature through the mind, you need to make the intellect truly discriminatory, in the ultimate sense. This does not mean dividing everything into good and bad, right and wrong, high and low, heaven and hell, sacred and profane. Instead, all it means is learning to discern the real from the illusory, what is existentially true from what is psychologically true.”
― Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

“It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The problem of our times, however, is that the intellect has taken on a disproportionately important role. Modern education has encouraged a completely lopsided development of this aspect of the mind. The essence of the intellect is to divide. So humanity has embarked on a journey of wholesale division, discrimination, and dissection. We have split everything. Even the invisible atom has been split. Once you unleash the intellect, it splits everything it encounters; it does not allow you to be with anything totally. Although it is a wonderful instrument for survival, it is also at the same time a terrible barrier that stands between you and your experience of the oneness of life.”
― Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

“The choice is always before you: to respond consciously to the present; or to react compulsively to it. There is a vast difference between the two. And it can make the world of a difference.”
― Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

“Once your intellect—or buddhi, as it is termed in the yogic taxonomy—gets identified with something, you function within the realm of this identity. Whatever you are identified with, all your thoughts and emotions spring from that identity.”
― Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

“Yoga is a journey toward a reality in which you experience the ultimate nature of existence as borderless unity.”
― Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“[The novelist's job is to] make everything, even an ultimate concern, as solid, as concrete, as specific as possible.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Universality is not an idea; it is an existential truth. It is individuality that is an idea. Yoga is simply chitta vritti nirodha. That means, if the activity of your mind ceases and you are still alert, you are in yoga.”
― Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The system of yoga is a technology to create a distinction between you and your mind. There is a space between you and what you have gathered in terms of body and mind. Becoming conscious of this space is your first and only step to freedom. It is the accumulated physiological and psychological content that causes the cyclical patterns in your life and even beyond. If you can be constantly conscious of this space between you and the body-mind, you have opened up a dimension of limitless possibility.”
― Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

“We are all one. Only egos, beliefs, and fears separate us.”
― Nikola Tesla, Nikola Tesla: 100 Quotes on Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Success

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The fear is simply because you are not living with life, You are living in your mind.”
― sadhguru

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“Of all evil I deem you capable: Therefore I want good from you. Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I suppose all of my films have a common theme. If I think about it, though, the only theme I can think of is really a question: Why can’t people be happier together?”
― Akira Kurosawa

“The writer, without softening his vision, is obliged to capture or conjure readers. And this means any kind of reader. It means whatever is there. I used to think that it should be possible to write for some supposed elite, for the people who attend the universities and sometimes know how to read, but I have since found that though you may publish your stories in the Yale Review, if they are any good at all you are eventually going to get a letter from some old lady in California, or some inmate of the Federal Penitentiary, or the state in sane asylum, or the local poorhouse, telling you where you have failed to meet his needs. And his need of course is to be lifted up. There is something in us as story-tellers, and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance of restoration. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but he has forgotten the cost of it. His sense of evil is deluded or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. He has forgotten the price of truth, even in fiction.”
― Flannery O'Conner

“The whole point of yoga is to bring you to an experience wherein, if you sit here, there is no such thing as “you” and “me.” It is all me—or all you! Any process that helps you to reach this union is yoga.”
― Sadhguru, Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy

“I write to discover what I know.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“If it could just be a hell beyond that: the clean flame the two of us more than dead. Then you will have only me then only me then the two of us amid the pointing and the horror beyond the clean flame… Only you and me amid the pointing and the horror walled by the clean flame.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the fundamental law of your true self. Compare these objects, see how one complements, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they form a stepladder upon which you have climbed up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not hidden deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you normally take to be yourself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche