"In the end
these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you live?
How deeply did you let go?"
— Siddhārtha Gautama

"(Asked what he thought of Western civilization) 'I think it would be a good idea.'"
— Mahatma Gandhi

"When affirmation and negation came into being, Tao faded. After Tao faded, then came one-sided attachments. "
— Chuang Tzu

"If someone says, "You can make it!" down a vertical mountain when you don't ski very well, think about it before launching. This can be a turning point in your life. It sure was in mine when I slammed into the mountain.

I wish I'd said, "F'getabout it, sucka," and gone to the Kiddie Corral. Would have saved a lot of pain and surgery.

Think about this. What are you really up for? Is the thrill worth the cost?"
— Sandy Nathan (Numenon)

"Protestantism harbors within it certain elements – just as the Great Reformer himself harbored such elements within his personality. I am thinking here of a sentimentality, a trancelike self-hypnosis that is not European, that is foreign and hostile to our active hemisphere’s law of life. Just look at him, this Luther. Look at the portraits, both as a young man and later. What a skull, what cheekbones, what a strange set to the eyes. My friend, that is Asia. I would be surprised, would be astonished, if Wendish-Slavic-Sarmatian blood was not at work there, and if it was not this massive phenomenon of a man – and who would deny him that – who proved to be a fatal weight placed on one of the two precariously balanced scales of your nation, on the Eastern scale, which caused – and still causes – the Western scale to fly heavenward."
— Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain)