The Mindfulness Path to Self-Compassion by Christopher K Germer
Forgiveness is essential in life because we make mistakes all the time. (156)
Hatred corrodes the vessel in which it’s stored. (161)
Negative feelings toward others tend to separate us from ourselves and from others—they trigger aversion. (161)
There are traditionally six categories of people with whom we train ourselves in the art of loving-kindness. The trick is to start with an easy target, reinforce the loving-kindness habit, and work up from there.
- Self—Your personal identity, usually located within the skin.
- Benefactor—Someone who makes you consistently smile, such as a mentor, a child, a spiritual guide, a pet, or a piece of nature.
- Friend—A supportive person toward whom you feel trust and gratitude and have mostly positive feelings.
- Neutral—Any living being whom you don’t know and therefore neither like nor dislike.
- Difficult—Someone who has caused you pain, or toward whom you have negative feelings.
- Groups—Any group of living beings, for example, everybody listed above, everyone in your home, workplace, or city. (167-168)
The most natural time to practice loving-kindness toward others is when you’re genuinely happy—when you have loving energy to spare. It’s easy to wish happiness for others when we’re happy. (180)
Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
To one who stands outside the Christian faith, it is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience. (62)
The truth is . . . the conflict between religion and science is unavoidable. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science. (63)
The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathematical modeling; it is intellectual honesty. It is time we acknowledged a basic feature of human discourse: when considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn’t. Religion is the one area of our lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies. (64-65)
While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. (67-68)
Any intellectually honest person will admit that he does not know why the universe exists. (74)
Further Out Than You Thought by Michaela Carter
The past. It’s like it has nowhere to go. It’s like that [May] pole. We’re all tied to it, we all keep walking around and around. Or else it’s like the earth—the earth spinning, but also how it builds up, a layer at a time. It’s what we bury. What we succeed in not thinking about, so long as we think it’s gone. But it isn’t gone. It’s never really gone. And then it just bubbles up, like the tar pits, or like pus in a zit. (197)
Outside the bar . . . night was coming on like a hopeless, drunken come-on, tequila on its breath, red neon signs and, outside the shops, strings of colored Christmas lights hung fr)om the eaves like the sad close-lipped smiles of boys who would lure you in with their loneliness, that melancholia you’d try and try to fix. (211)
How easy it was . . . to take oneself out of the picture. (221)
The light at the end of the tunnel . . . on never thought it’d be red. At the beginning of the tunnel, maybe, but at the end, one presumed, the light would be white, bluish white, if it had any hue at all. Red wasn’t transcendence, but return. Red was home. It was a stove and a fireplace, a cup of something warm to wrap one’s hands around. (229)
Her waking dream would be lucid and the magic in her life, real. (266)
The Lady and the Peacock by Peter Popham
Quoting Pascal Khoo Thwe: People who had been silent for twenty-six years now wanted to shout, or at least endlessly to debate. (61)
Once the waters of a revolution start flowing, you can’t push them back forever. . . . (118)
Quoting Ma Thanegi: With the exception of very few I would like to hit poets who are writing poetry, usually very bad, about doing this and doing that . . . and reading them aloud. . . . (134)
Every nation is defined by the holidays it marks; it is the way the story of the nation punctuates the passage of time. (146)
Quoting Ann Pasternak Slater: [M]ost of us were neither laid back nor laid. (193)
The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt
Her notebooks became the ground where her conflicted anger and divided intellect could do battle on the page. (6)
Life is walking tiptoe over land mines. We never know what’s coming and, . . . we don’t have a good grip on what’s behind us either. But we sure as hell can spin a story about it and break our brains trying to get it right. (13)
Nonexistent, impossible, imaginary objects are in our thoughts all the time, but in art they move from the inside to the outside, words and images cross the border. (26)
There are many stories and as many reasons for leaving the feminine behind and adopting the masculine, or dropping either one for the other, as was convenient. (33)
What interested me were perceptions and their mutability, the fact that we mostly see what we expect to see. (33)