🅼Week 2024-52: On Middle Path

"Avoiding both these extremes, [indulgence of sense pleasures, devotion to self-mortification] the Tathagata has realized the Middle Path: it gives vision, it gives knowledge, and it leads to calm, to insight, to enlightenment, to Nirvana." ("Samyutta-nikāya" ["Kindred Sayings"], [Pāli Canon, first sermon of Buddha] cca. 5th century BC)

"The true way is the middle one, halfway between deserving a place and pushing oneself into it." (Baltasar Gracián, "The Art of Worldly Wisdom", 1647)

"Setting aside the fact that coercion and guidance can never succeed in producing virtue, they manifestly tend to weaken power; and what are tranquil order and outward morality without true moral strength and virtue? Moreover, however great an evil immorality may be, we must not forget that it is not without its beneficial consequences. It is only through extremes that men can arrive at the middle path of wisdom and virtue." (Wilhelm von Humboldt, "The Limits of State Action", 1792)

"Harmonizing opposites by going back to their source is the distinctive quality of the Zen attitude, the Middle Way: embracing contradictions, making a synthesis of them, achieving balance." (Taisen Deshimaru, "Zen: Here and Now", [documentary] 1971)

"Our task is to strike a balance, to find a middle way, to learn not to overextend ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations, but to simplify our lives more and more. The key to finding a happy balance in modern life is simplicity." (Sogyal Rinpoche, "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying", 1992)

"As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity." (Pema Chödrön, "When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times", 1996)

"The middle way cannot be achieved by dividing two extremes in half." (Eric Maisel, "Affirmations for Artists", 1996)

"The Buddha's message was simple but profound. Neither a life of self-indulgence nor one of self-mortification can bring happiness. Only a middle path, avoiding these two extremes, leads to peace of mind, wisdom, & complete liberation from the dissatisfactions of life." (Henepola Gunaratana, "Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness: Walking the Buddha's Path", 2001)

"To pursue enlightenment is to search for immeasurable truth, to acquire the ability manipulate life at will, to investigate phenomena that originate in our mind, and to undergo training to recall what our ancestors and predecessors had learned. The aim of the martial arts is not only to unveil the true nature and the laws of the universe through mental and physical exercises, but also to attain eternal tranquility. Enlightenment is achieved when the mind and body are guided to a higher dimension. An enlightened person holds no attachment to his skill or mind, let alone other worldly matters. This means that such a person knows how to practice the middle path." (Kazumi Tabata, "Mind Power: Secret Strategies for the Martial Arts", 2010)

🕉️Week 2024-49: Rabindranath Tagore - Collected Quotes

"A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple. (Rabindranath Tagore)

"Music fills the infinite between two souls." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"The fish in the water is silent, the animals on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing. But man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"The fundamental desire of life is the desire to exist." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"The higher nature in man always seeks for something which transcends itself and yet is its deepest truth; which claims all its sacrifice, yet makes this sacrifice its own recompense. This is man's dharma, man's religion, and man's self is the vessel which is to carry this sacrifice to the altar." (Rabindranath Tagore, "Sādhanā: The Realization of Life", 1913) 

"The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"The most important lesson that man can learn from his life is not that there is pain in this world, but that it depends upon him to turn it into good account, that it is possible for him to transmute it into joy... Man's freedom is never in being saved troubles, but it is the freedom to take trouble for his own good, to make the trouble an element in his joy [...] that in pain is symbolised the infinite possibility of perfection, the eternal unfolding of joy." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"The object of education is to give man the unity of truth. Formerly, when life was simple, all the different elements of man were in complete harmony. But when there came the separation of the intellect from the spiritual and the physical, the school education put entire emphasis on intellect and the physical side of man. We devote our sole attention to giving children information, not knowing that by this emphasis we are accentuating a break between the intellectual, physical, and the spiritual life... I believe in a spiritual world -  not as anything separate from this world -  but as its innermost truth. With the breath we draw we must always feel this truth, that we are living in God. Born in this great world, full of the mystery of the infinite, we cannot accept our existence as a momentary outburst of chance drifting on the current of matter toward an eternal nowhere. We cannot look upon our lives as dreams of a dreamer who has no awakening in all time. We have a personality to which matter and force are unmeaning unless related to something infinitely personal, whose nature we have discovered, in some measure, in human love, in the greatness of the good, in the martyrdom of heroic souls, in the ineffable beauty of nature which can never be a mere physical fact nor anything but an expression of personality." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"The picture of a flower in a botanical book is information; its mission ends with our knowledge. But in pure art it is a personal communication. And therefore until it finds its harmony in the depth of our personality it misses the mark. We can treat existence solely as a textbook furnishing us lessons, and we shall not be disappointed, but we know that there its mission does not end. For in our joy in it, which is an end in itself, we feel that it is a communication, the final response of our knowing but the response of our being." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"The progress of our soul is like a perfect poem. It has an infinite idea which once realised makes all movements full of meaning and joy. But if we detach its movements from that ultimate idea, if we do not see the infinite rest and only see the infinite motion, then existence appears to us a monstrous evil., impetuously rushing towards an unending aimlessness." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"The tendency in modern civilization is to make the world uniform... Let the mind be universal. The individual should not be sacrificed." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"Things are distinct not in their essence but in their appearance; in other words, in their relation to one to whom they appear. This is art, the truth of which is not in substance or logic, but in expression. Abstract truth may belong to science and metaphysics, but the world of reality belongs to art." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"To understand anything is to find in it something which is our own, and it is the discovery of ourselves outside us which makes us glad. This relation of understanding is partial, but the relation of love is complete. In love the sense of difference is obliterated and the human soul fulfills its purpose in perfection, transcending the limits of itself and reaching across the threshold of the infinite. Therefore love is the highest bliss that man can attain to, for through it alone he truly knows that he is more than himself, and that he is at one with the All." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"Whatever we treasure for ourselves separates us from others; our possessions are our limitations." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"Where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"With begging and scrambling we find very little, but with being true to ourselves we find a great deal more." (Rabindranath Tagore)

"You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. Don't let yourself indulge in vain wishes." (Rabindranath Tagore)