Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard Gere

My first encounter with Buddhist dharma would be in my early 20s. Like most young men, I was not particularly happy.

Vera Farmiga

I'm someone who can sit in a Buddhist temple, and I can sit with Pentecostals or with Orthodox Jews, and I still feel like I am in tune with all of them.

Lamar Alexander

It is ironic that Mr. Berger learned of this espionage in exactly the same month that Mr. Gore was attending his now famous fund-raiser with Buddhist nuns in Southern California.

Nhat Hanh

One day I saw a picture of the Buddha on a Buddhist magazine and he was sitting on the grass, and he was sitting on the grass, very peaceful, smiling, and I was impressed. Around me people were not like that, so I had the desire to be someone like him. I nourished that kind of desire until the age of sixteen, when I had the permission from my parents to go and ordain as a Buddhist monk.

Nhat Hanh

Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. All systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth.

Nhat Hanh

Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I am committed to cultivating compassion and learning ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to support any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, and in my way of life.

Nhat Hanh

I realize that many elements of the Buddhist teaching can be found in Christianity, Judaism, Islam. I think if Buddhism can help, it is the concrete methods of practice.

Nhat Hanh

If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything. When a child presents himself to you with his smile, if you are not really there - thinking about the future or the past, or preoccupied with other problems - then the child is not really there for you. The technique of being alive is to go back to yourself in order for the child to appear like a marvellous reality. Then you can see him smile and you can embrace him in your arms.

Nhat Hanh

So if we love someone, we should train in being able to listen. By listening with calm and understanding, we can ease the suffering of another person. [True Love. A Practice for Awakening the Heart.]

Russell Lynes

Cynicism is the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence. It is the dishonest businessman's substitute for conscience. It is the communicator's substitute, whether he is advertising man or editor or writer, for self-respect.

William Zinsser

I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.

William Jennings Bryan

Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.

William James

Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations.

Roger Ascham

There is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good wit and encourage a will to learning, as is praise.

Robert Scheer

I teach at USC, and it's obvious to anyone who teaches college students that they don't cover much modern history and certainly not the modern presidency.

Robert M. Hutchins

Freedom of inquiry, freedom of discussion, and freedom of teaching - without these a university cannot exist.

William Hung

I enjoy tutoring. I just really enjoy the experience of teaching.

William Bennett

The secretary of education does not work for the education establishment. The secretary works for the American people.

Nhat Hanh

Buddhism has to do with your daily life, with your suffering and with the suffering of the people around you.

Pico Iyer

The Dalai Lama, these days, encourages Westerners not to take up Buddhism, partly because he feels that our roots are deep in other traditions, and we should go deeper into our own traditions rather than just acquiring the surfaces of others.

Shunryu Suzuki

When you try to attain something, your mind starts to wander about somewhere else. When you do not try to attain anything, you have your own body and mind right here. In Buddhism it is a heretical view to expect something outside this world. We do not seek for something besides ourselves.

Pema Chodron

Buddhism itself is all about empowering yourself, not about getting what you want.

Pema Chodron

We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be.

Pema Chodron

Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones. Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time-that is the basic message.

Pankaj Mishra

Buddhism resonated very powerfully with a lot of my preoccupations.

Pankaj Mishra

I don't feel any great need to subscribe to a certain notion of Buddhism that says "You have to do this" or "You have to do that." Buddhism does not prescribe rituals or prohibitions in the way many religions do.

Camille Paglia

The followers of Derrida are pathetic, snuffling in French pockets for bits of pieces of a deconstructive method already massively and coherently presented and with a mature sense of the sacred in Buddhism and Hinduism.