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“One problem with our current society is that we have an attitude towards education as if it is there to simply make you more clever, make you more ingenious. Sometimes it even seems as if those who are not highly educated, those who are less sophisticated in terms of their educational training, are more innocent and more honest. Even though our society does not emphasize this, the most important use of knowledge and education is to help us understand the importance of engaging in more wholesome actions and bringing about discipline within our minds. The proper utilization of our intelligence and knowledge is to effect changes from within to develop a good heart.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living

“From the Buddhist point of view, we are each responsible for our own situation, whether we care to admit it or not. We are all active participants in the creation of our own karma. We all have the capacity to determine our future paths.”
― David Nichtern, Awakening from the Daydream: Reimagining the Buddha's Wheel of Life

“Silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around. —John Cage”
― Jane Brox, Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives

“For many people today, gardening is about lawns and almost nothing else. In the United States lawns cover more surface area—fifty thousand square miles—than any single farm crop. Grass on domestic lawns wants to do what wild grasses do in nature—namely, grow to a height of about two feet, flower, turn brown, and die. To keep it short and green and continuously growing means manipulating it fairly brutally and pouring a lot of stuff onto it. In the western United States about 60 percent of all the water that comes out of taps for all purposes is sprinkled on lawns. Worse still are the amounts of herbicides and pesticides—seventy million pounds of them a year—that are soaked into lawns. It is a deeply ironic fact that for most of us keeping a handsome lawn is about the least green thing we do.”
― Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life