Josh > Josh's Quotes

“You only lose what you cling to.”
― Guatama Buddha

“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.”
― Jean Paul Sartre

“Life begins on the other side of despair.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“We live in an era of smart phones and stupid people.... Go figure.”
― Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics

“All cruelty springs from weakness.”
― Seneca, Seneca's Morals: Of a Happy Life, Benefits, Anger and Clemency

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.”
― Seneca

“Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“A fool sees himself as another, but a wise man sees others as himself.”
― Dōgen, How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment

“Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed, do not squander your life.”
― Dōgen

“If you want to travel the Way of Buddhas and Zen masters, then expect nothing, seek nothing, and grasp nothing.”
― Dogen Zenji

“Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment. (From 'Fukan zazengi')”
― Dōgen Zenji

“It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.”
― Yoshida Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees

“If man were never to fade away... but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us. The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.”
― Kenko Yoshida

“If you follow the ways of the world, your heart will be drawn to its sensual defilements and easily led astray; if you go among people, your words will be guided by others' responses rather than come from the heart.”
― Yoshida Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees

“Why should it be so difficult to carry something out right now when you think of it, to seize the instant?”
― Yoshida Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees

“It is the ephemeral nature of things that makes them wonderful.”
― Yoshida Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees

“In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth. Someone once told me, "Even when building the imperial palace, they always leave one place unfinished." In both Buddhist and Confucian writings of the philosophers of former times, there are also many missing chapters.”
― Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity and stumble from defeat to defeat.

Perfection is static, and I am in full progress.

Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.

-Anais Nin

"Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." -Bible-Genesis 3:19

"While I thought that I was learning to live, I have been learning how to die" - Leonardo da Vinci”
― anais nin

“For Time calls only once, and that determines all.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“A child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”
― African Proverb

“The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder