Jonny Lamenza > Jonny's Quotes

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“who
is invisible enough
to see you”
― Paul Celan

“Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.”
― Paul Celan

“No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it”
― Fernando Pessoa

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The flow of the river is ceaseless; and its water is never the same.
The foam that floats in the pools
Now gathering, now vanishing
Never lasts long. So it is with man
and all his dwelling places on this earth.”
― Kamo no Chōmei, Notebook of a Ten-Square Rush Mat Sized World

“To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is pleasure beyond compare.”
― Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō

“Do not permit the events of your daily lives to bind you, but never withdraw yourselves from them. Only by acting thus can you earn the title of 'A Liberated One'.”
― Huang Po, The Zen Teaching of Huang Po: On the Transmission of Mind

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” - Buddha”
― Buddhaghosa

“Discipline" is a difficult word for most of us. It conjures up images of somebody standing over you with a stick, telling you that you're wrong. But self-discipline is different. It's the skill of seeing through the hollow shouting of your own impulses and piercing their secret. They have no power over you. It's all a show, a deception. Your urges scream and bluster at you; they cajole; they coax; they threaten; but they really carry no stick at all. You give in out of habit. You give in because you never really bother to look beyond the threat. It is all empty back there. There is only one way to learn this lesson, though. The words on this page won't do it. But look within and watch the stuff coming up-restlessness, anxiety, impatience, pain-just watch it come up and don't get involved. Much to your surprise, it will simply go away. It rises, it passes away. As simple as that. There is another word for self-discipline. It is patience.”
― Henepola Gunaratana

“If the problem can be solved why worry? If the problem cannot be solved worrying will do you no good.”
― Shantideva

“O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life,
but exhaust the limits of the possible.”
― Pindar

“All the various types of teachings and spiritual paths are related to the different capacities of understanding that different individuals have. There does not exist, from an absolute point of view, any teaching which is more perfect or effective than another. A teaching's value lies solely in the inner awakening which an individual can arrive at through it. If a person benefits from a given teaching, for that person that teaching is the supreme path, because it is suited to his or her nature and capacities. There's no sense in trying to judge it as more or less elevated in relation to other paths to realization.”
― Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State

“Your own Self-Realization is the greatest service you can render the world.”
― Ramana Maharshi

“The familiar world of substantial objects and enduring persons is, according to the dhamma theory, a conceptual construct fashioned by the mind out of the raw data provided by the dhammas. The entities of our everyday frame of reference possess merely a consensual reality derivative upon the foundational stratum of the dhammas.”
― Bhikkhu Bodhi, A Comprehensive Manual of Abhidhamma: The Abhidhammattha Sangaha

“What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)”
― Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

“Creating new people, by having babies, is so much a part of human life that it is rarely thought even to require a justification. Indeed, most people do not even think about whether they should or should not make a baby. They just make one. In other words, procreation is usually the consequence of sex rather than the result of a decision to bring people into existence. Those who do indeed decide to have a child might do so for any number of reasons, but among these reasons cannot be the interests of the potential child. One can never have a child for that child’s sake.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“The vitality of a culture is in its capacity to assimilate foreign influences. The culture that's defensive and closed condemns itself to decadence.”
― Juan Goytisolo

“The atheist, agnostic, or secularist ... should guard against the encroachment of religion in areas where it has no place, and in particular the control of education by religious authority. The attempts to ban the teaching of evolution or other scientific theories -- a feeble echo of medieval church tyranny and hostility to learning, but an echo nonetheless are serious threats to freedom of inquiry and should be vigorously combated.”
― S.T. Joshi, Atheism: A Reader

“Sexual desire is only the frustrated desire to eat human flesh.”
― Christopher Frayling

“Exceptional men do not hold their experiences to be out of the ordinary or of interest to anyone else. Unlike the trodden fungus-men, they are not so ignorantly and presumptuously self-absorbed. They are nobody and they know it. They shun notice. They are exceedingly rare.”
― Nick Tosches, Me and the Devil

“The English were fascinated with the Italian people and their amazing Epicurean culture. Italian poetry, painting, pornography, music, drama, fashion, wine, women, cheese, anything Italiano was a premium commodity in London during Shakespeare’s day.”
― Mark Lamonica, Renaissance Porn Star: The Saga of Pietro Aretino, The World's Greatest Hustler

“To doubt everything and to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; each saves us from thinking.”
― Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science: Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science, Science and Method

“Consider now the Milky Way. Here also we see an innumerable dust, only the grains of this dust are no longer atoms but stars; these grains also move with great velocities, they act at a distance one upon another, but this action is so slight at great distances that their trajectories are rectilineal; nevertheless, from time to time, two of them may come near enough together to be deviated from their course, like a comet that passed too close to Jupiter. In a word, in the eyes of a giant, to whom our Suns were what our atoms are to us, the Milky Way would only look like a bubble of gas.”
― Henri Poincaré, Science and Method

“La pensée n'est qu'un écliar au milieu d'une longue nuit. Mais c'est cet éclair qui est tout.

Thought is only a flash in the middle of a long night. But this flash means everything.”
― Henri Poincaré, The Value of Science: Essential Writings of Henri Poincare

“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
― Stanisław Jerzy Lec

“The greater the dark, the easier to be a star.”
― Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, Unkempt Thoughts

“Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to believe in what they understand”
― Stanisław Jerzy Lec