1,972 Quotes About Buddhism

Virtually everyone defines their identity—or constructs their belief of who they are—through their specific combination of desires and suffering. Or, desires obtained (apparent subjective success at the sacrifice of something else), desires unobtained (suffering), and desires still left as questions (to be obtained or not). And...most of the desires, and the suffering, are themselves by-products of others, established by society and the rules of each sect of society.

In making a clear distinction between desire (answer) and yearning (question), we inevitably end up back at personal purpose.

We often do not, not because we cannot, but because we think so.

The challenges are illusions, but necessary ones to determine if you can see through them.

Now, if you open the treasure chest of desire, what do you find there? What do all the desires have in common? You. Go ahead and stop here and test it for a few days if you are really serious about the question. After you get past the first thousand, you begin to enter into a subtle territory, known as the border between desire and yearning. Or, if you want, between answers and questions. The defining quality, or essence, of desire is that it is engaged as if it were an answer.

Once you get off the bandwagon of believing that truth is your enemy and is bad news with all kinds of associated unhappy obligations, you can then afford to take it on with some enthusiasm and start to have some fun with it.

We live in a dimension where it is necessary to find a balance between wants and needs, or desires and yearning, or answers and questions. The totality of these makes up what we know as reality or truth, at least adolescent truth—facts. The fact of the matter is, you have to live in society one way or another, and there’s a reason for that, so the base of engagement begins with acceptance of the variables as they actually are.

There are a hundred layers of dust and you are saying, 'This layer is mind, this layer is soul. I want to remove this and save this.' No. All of it is mind. All of it has to go. You have to go. What will remain is the divine you.

Human minds are like spiders. All kinds of webs are being weaved by them to keep the souls trapped: materialistic webs, spiritual webs, religious webs, charity webs, profit webs... you name it.