Stephen Anders

“Q. Was the Buddha God? A. No. Buddha Dharma teaches no "divine" incarnation.”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Buddhist Catechism

“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.”
― Josh Bazell, Wild Thing

“As long as we live in our illusions, both about ourselves and about the world, we have no chance of growing or changing. In the recovery world, this illusion is called "denial," the unwillingness to acknowledge our problem; in Buddhism it's called "wrong view," a distorted understanding of reality and ourselves. And so, the starting point for these twin paths is revealing ourselves-to ourselves and to others. We must look deeply and honestly at our thinking and our actions and admit our failings and our suffering. Until we take this first, often painful, step, we have no chance at recovery or happiness. Once we make these admissions, though, we discover that this self-revealing is actually the most freeing thing we can do.”
― Kevin Griffin, Buddhism & The Twelve Steps Workbook: A Workbook for Individuals and Groups

“Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.”
― Aldous Huxley