Quotes About Perspective

a psychotic person is drowning in the very same things that a mystic swims in.

When my children were teenagers, I took them to meet the Sixteenth Karmapa. As they weren't Buddhists, I asked His Holiness to say something that didn't require any understanding of the dharma. Without hesitating, he told them: "You are going to die; and when you do, you will take nothing with you but your state of mind.

In reality, whatever arises in our experience is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong. Yet we spend so much energy and suffer so much because we believe in all these concepts.

Any experience can be made into a further blockage or can become a way of freeing ourselves.

you are the sky. everything else - it's just the weather.

The problem isn't with the beliefs themselves but with how we use them to get ground under our feet, how we use them to feel right and to make someone else wrong

Don't make gods into demons.

That we take ourselves so seriously, that we are so absurdly important in our own minds, is a problem. Self-importance is like a prison for us, limiting us to the world of our likes and dislikes. We end up bored to death with ourselves and our world. We end up very dissatisfied.

Here's something that's very helpful to know about now. The biggest obstacle to taking a bigger perspective on life is that our emotions capture and blind us.

The basic thing is to realize that we have everything going for us. We don't have extreme pain that's inescapable. We don't have total pleasure that lulls us into ignorance. When we start feeling depressed, it's helpful to reflect on that. Maybe this is a good time to read the newspapers a lot and remember how terrifying life can be.

The more we connect with a bigger perspective, the more we connect with energetic joy. Exertion is touching in to our appetite for enlightenment. It allows us to act, to give, to work appreciatively with whatever comes our way.

This has been going on through the ages. They criticize the silent ones. They criticize the talkative ones. They criticize the moderate ones. There is no one in the world that escapes criticism. There never was and never will be, nor is there now, the wholly criticized or the wholly approved.

You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather.

We can make ourselves miserable, or we can make ourselves strong. The amount of effort is the same. Right now we are creating our state of mind for tomorrow, not to mention this afternoon, next week, next year, and all the years of our lives.

I feel anger and I feel understanding. It's a difficult position to be in.

You may very well have good reasons for resentment, frustration and anger. But that doesn't mean those negative responses are good for you, or that you must choose them.

To get rid of anger you can change the situation or change how you think about the situation.

I don't get all the anger that is thrown at comedians.

I don't hate people, i assume they are dead!

Who can refute a sneer?

A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong.

I even accept for the sake of argument that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.

I simply cannot accept that there are on every story two equal and logical sides to an argument.

You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.