Steven Cartledge

“You can save yourself a lot of anguish by investigating your response to the fundamental qualities of pleasure and pain. If you are unmindful of a pleasant feeling, the underlying tendency to greed gets activated. If you are unmindful of an unpleasant feeling, the underlying tendency to aversion gets activated. If you are unmindful of a neutral feeling, the underlying tendency to delusion gets activated.11 People commonly try to increase the pleasant, react against the unpleasant, and are dulled, confused, or inattentive to the neutral feelings. A skillful meditator will develop the flexibility to direct awareness to these subtler layers of experience and investigate the interaction of pleasure and greed, pain and aversion, neutrality and delusion.”
― Shaila Catherine, Focused and Fearless: A Meditator's Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity

“The human mind is incapable of formulating (or mechanizing) all its mathematical intuitions, i.e., if it has succeeded in formulating some of them, this very fact yields new intuitive knowledge, e.g., the consistency of this formalism. This fact may be called the “incompletability” of mathematics. On the other hand, on the basis of what has been proved so far, it remains possible that there may exist (and even be empirically discoverable) a theorem proving machine which in fact is equivalent to mathematical intuition, but cannot be proved to be so, nor even be proved to yield only correct theorems of finitary number theory.”
― Kurt Gödel

“There are two kinds of happiness; the kind to be pursued and the kind to be avoided,” the Buddha said.“When I observed that in the pursuit of such happiness, unwholesome factors increased and wholesome factors decreased, then that happiness was to be avoided. When I observed that in the pursuit of such happiness unwholesome factors decreased and wholesome ones increased, then that happiness was to be sought after.”7 The Buddha asks us: What pursuits lead to wholesome forces developing? And what pursuits lead to unwholesome forces thriving? The Buddha was a proponent of an efficient, long-term, sustainable approach to happiness, never settling for resigned acceptance of limited conventional comforts.”
― Shaila Catherine, Focused and Fearless: A Meditator's Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity

“Fortune's Malice. Mad Fortune sweeps along in wanton pride, Uncertain as Euripus' surging tide; Now tramples mighty kings beneath her feet; Now sets the conquered in the victor's seat. She heedeth not the wail of hapless woe, But mocks the griefs that from her mischief flow. Such is her sport; so proveth she her power; And great the marvel, when in one brief hour She shows her darling lifted high in bliss, Then headlong plunged in misery's abyss.”
― Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy