The Difficulty of Being Good Quotes

“The Upanishads trace these problems of the self to our sense of ‘Iness’ or ahamkara (literally ‘I-maker’) which is our subjective sense of identity and which has its origin in our consciousness (aham). In classical Sankhya philosophy, the empirical world of the senses and the mind emerges from the evolution of the aham, and liberation from this empirical existence requires the negation of ahamkara.”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“Nature is full of examples of dharma-like goodness. Dolphins will help lift an injured companion for hours to help it survive. Blackbirds and thrushes give warning calls when they spot a hawk even if it means risking their own lives.”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“This explains why the characters in the Mahabharata and in other texts of the classical Indian tradition prefer to depend on reason rather than on blind faith. 56”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“Dharma, in any case, is at the heart of the poem; it is not only untranslatable, but the Mahabharata’s characters are still trying to figure it out at the epic’s end.”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“Who has in his heart always the well-being of others, and is wholly given, in acts, thoughts, and in speech, to the good of others, he alone knows what dharma is.”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“beyond their right—and now they would be made to pay for it. Envy was being acted out, as never before.’62 It led to the murder of six million Jews in the Second World War. Today, I find envy laced through the statements of European and Indian intellectuals about America. Arundhati Roy’s essay after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington is an example. Like many anti-American intellectuals writing in the days after the attack, Roy claimed that it was the direct result of American foreign policy—the implication being that America somehow deserved what had happened. There is widespread anti-American sentiment in the world which regards the United States as arrogant, indifferent to human suffering, consumerist, and contemptuous of international law. Much of this is probably correct, but I find that some of it is inspired by envy of America’s success.”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“The Jews have been victim to a general envy by the unsuccessful for the successful. Forced out of their homeland 2,000 years ago by Roman oppression, they spread across Europe and prospered spectacularly in many places, including Vienna and Berlin, till Hitler took over. Joseph Epstein tells us that in the ‘Vienna of 1936, a city that was 90 per cent Catholic and 9 per cent Jewish, Jews accounted for 60 per cent of the city’s lawyers, more than half its physicians, more than 90 per cent of its advertising executives, and 123 of its 174 newspaper editors. And this is not to mention the prominent places Jews held in banking, retailing, and intellectual and artistic life. The numbers four or five years earlier for Berlin are said to have been roughly similar.’61 Is it surprising that Nazism had its greatest resonance in these two cities? Before killing the Jews, Germans and Austrians felt the need to humiliate their victims: ‘They had Jewish women cleaning floors, had Jewish physicians scrubbing the cobblestone streets of Vienna with toothbrushes as Nazi youth urinated on them and forced elderly Jews to do hundreds of deep knee bends until they fainted or sometimes died. All this suggests a vicious evening of the score that has the ugly imprint of envy on the loose. The Jews in Germany and Austria had succeeded not only beyond their numbers but also, in the eyes of the envious,”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma

“no”
― Gurcharan Das, The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma