The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons Quotes

“A profound impression was created by the discourses of Professor GN Chakravarti and Mrs Besant, who is said to have risen to unusual heights of eloquence, so exhilarating were the influences of the gathering. Besides those who represented our society and religions, especially Vivekananda, VR Gandhi, Dharmapala, captivated the public, who had only heard of Indian people through the malicious reports of interested missionaries, and were now astounded to see before them and hear men who represented the ideal of spirituality and human perfectibility as taught in their respective sacred writings.”
― Henry Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“Eternal Rest. If I have the temerity to prefer my own definition of the spirit of Buḍḍha's doctrine, it is because I think that all the misconceptions of it have arisen from a failure to understand his idea of what is real and what is unreal, what worth longing and striving for and what not. From this misconception have come all the unfounded charges that Buḍḍhism is an "atheistical," that is to say, a grossly materialistic, a nihilistic, a negative, a vice-breeding religion. Buḍḍhism denies the existence of a personal God—true: therefore—well, therefore, and notwithstanding all this, its teaching is neither what may be called properly atheistical, nihilistic, negative, nor provocative of vice. I will try to make my meaning clear, and the advancement of modern scientific research helps in this direction. Science divides the universe for us into two elements—matter and force;”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“Everything in the world of Matter is unreal; the only reality is in the world of Spirit.”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“He found that the pleasures of the eye, the ear, the taste, touch and smell are fleeting and deceptive: he who gives value to them brings only disappointment and bitter sorrow upon himself.”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“This process of euhemerisation, as it is called, or the making of men into gods and gods into men, sometimes, though more rarely, begins during the life of the hero, but usually after death. The true history of his life is gradually amplified and decorated with fanciful incidents, to fit it to the new character which has been posthumously given him.”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“The thoughtful student, in scanning the religious history of the race, has one fact continually forced upon his notice, viz., that there is an invariable tendency to deify whomsoever shows himself superior to the weakness of our common humanity.”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“teachings of this heroic prince of Kapilavasṭu? Lessons”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“This process of euhemerisation, as it is called, or the making of men into gods and gods into men, sometimes, though more rarely, begins during the life of the hero, but usually after death. The true history of his life”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“display vanity in their worship and ostentation in their almsgiving; that they are fostering sects as bitterly as Hinḍūs? So much the worse for the laymen: there is the example of Buḍḍha and his Law. Am I told that Buḍḍhist priests are ignorant, idle fosterers of superstitions grafted on their religion by foreign kings? So much the worse for the priests: the life of their Divine Master shames them and shows their unworthiness to wear his yellow robe or carry his beggar's”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“The thoughtful student, in scanning the religious history of the race, has one fact continually forced upon his notice, viz., that there is an invariable tendency to deify whomsoever shows himself superior to the weakness of our common humanity. Look where we will, we find the saint-like man exalted into a divine personage and worshipped for a god. Though”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“He found that the pleasures of the eye, the ear, the taste, touch and smell are fleeting and deceptive: he who gives value to them brings only disappointment and bitter sorrow upon himself. The”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“gives”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“euhemerisation,”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“Intercessor in Heaven, is besought with prayer and”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“Everything in the world of Matter is unreal; the only reality is in the world of Spirit. Emancipate yourselves from the tyranny of the former; strive to attain the latter.”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“there is an invariable tendency to deify whomsoever shows himself superior to the weakness of our common humanity.”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“he? When did he live? How did he live?”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“Approaching the question of the hour in this spirit of precaution, what do we find are the probabilities respecting the life of Sākya Muni? Who was he? When did he live? How did he live? What did he teach? A most careful comparison of authorities and analysis of evidence establishes, I think, the following data: 1. He was the son of a king. 2. He lived between six and seven centuries before Christ. 3. He resigned his royal state and went to live in the jungle, and among the lowest and most unhappy classes, so as to learn the secret of human pain and misery by personal experience: tested every known”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“accounting for their phenomena by their combinations, and making both eternal and obedient to eternal and immutable law. The speculations of men of science have carried them to the outermost verge of the physical universe. Behind them lie not only a thousand brilliant triumphs by which a part of Nature's secrets have been wrung from her, but also more thousands of failures to fathom her deep mysteries. They have proved thought material, since it is the evolution of the gray tissue of the brain, and a recent German experimentalist, Professor Dr. Jäger, claims to have proved that man's soul is "a volatile odoriferous principle, capable of solution in glycerine". Psychogen is the name he gives to it, and his experiments show that it is present not merely in the body as a whole, but in every individual cell, in the ovum, and even in the ultimate elements of protoplasm. I need hardly say to so intelligent”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“by one thought—the vanity of finite existence, the priceless value of the one condition of”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“Earth is a show, and Heaven is a vain reward." Primitive Buḍḍhism was engrossed, absorbed,”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“4. What he taught may be summed up in a few words, as the perfume of many roses may be distilled into a few drops of attar: Everything in the world of Matter is unreal; the only reality is in the world of Spirit. Emancipate yourselves from the tyranny of the former; strive to attain the latter. The Rev. Samuel Beal, in his Catena of Buḍḍhist Scriptures from the Chinese puts it differently. "The idea underlying the Buddhist religious system is," he says, "simply this: 'all is vanity'.”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons

“vice-breeding”
― Henry Steel Olcott, The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons