John Quotes

Expecting to be wrong about most things most of the time brings, finally, the kind of humility that leads to peace. I think.

Just studying Buddhism, then meditating and going to Buddhist monasteries, talking to Buddhist monks, combined with the Thai people themselves, changed the way I look at the world.

When you notice light seeping into your coffin, it's hard to go on pretending that you're still dead.

To a Buddhist, contradictions only exist in a mind that has been forced to cultivate them.

The world other than as advertised can be an amazing place.

There are plenty of brilliant people who are too stressed out to read challenging literary novels.

Shun security, I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck. Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isnt agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort.

The function of the West is to turn bodies and minds into products. It cannot understand that the rest of the world holds this to be an obscenity, a corruption of our nirvanic nature.

Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime, A rose-red city'half as old asTime'!

Let me begin by saying that I am one of those naturally wary people who considers the verb return a kind of insidious threat.

Certain experiences you never forget, no matter how old you become.

It is one thing to recognise certain potentially useful affinities, and another to act on them.

You come before me this morning with clean hands and clean collars. I want you to have clean tongues, clean manners, clean morals and clean characters.

For the moment and for some time great events have been denied me, forward action not come my way.

My duty is clear and at all costs will be done.

I believe, however, that impending events will call us and we must respond but where, with whom, and how?

Don't hustle old people.

I don't want boys to use their pencils for improper writing.

Individual effort is almost relatively impossible to cope with the big problem of poverty as we see it.

Judge men less by the labels they wear than by their persistent labour for sure if slow progress.

I am only doing now what I have ever done; and ever will continue to do - that is adapting past experience to present reform in the light of high ideals and future objects.

I am not ashamed to say that I am the son of a washerwoman.

Without death and decay, how could life go on?

The God of the Puritans...was a monster too horrible to contemplate.

Few persons realize how much of their happiness, such as it is, is dependent upon their work.

[Nuclear weapons] now I think I mentioned around 27,000 and during the Cold War the total global arsenal was on the order of 70,000.

The U.S. had about 10,000 nuclear warheads. It is estimated that the U.S. is heading towards having 6,000 nuclear warheads in the year 2012.

The story goes on in the sense that at a most basic level, the United States ignored, that is violated, the United Nations charter when it invaded Iraq in 2003. This is not wise policy.

I came from a race of fishers; trout streams gurgled about the roots of my family tree.

You cannot use [nuclear weapons] to target civilians; you cannot use them against military targets if they have indiscriminate effects on civilians in addition to the attack on the military target.

When I look up into the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is I really see there, I am constrained to say, ´there is no god´.

Then, again, how annoying to be told it is only five miles to the next place when it is really eight or ten!

The pleasure and value of every walk or journey we take may be doubled to us by carefully noting down the impressions it makes upon us.

One goes to Nature only for hints and half-truths. Her facts are crude until you have absorbed them or translated them ... It is not so much what we see as what the thing seen suggests.

How much there is in books that one does not want to know, that it would be a mere weariness and burden to the spirit to know.

In the order of nature we may behold the ways of the Eternal.

Every day is a Sabbath to me. All pure water is holy water, and this earth is a celestial abode.

One can return to their place of birth, but one cannot go back to your youth.

One may return to the place of his birth, He cannot go back to his youth.

The deeper our insight into the methods of nature . . . the more incredible the popular Christianity seems to us.

The atmosphere of our time is fast being cleared of the fumes and deadly gases that arose during the carboniferous age of theology.

In the printed page the only real things are the paper and the ink; the white spaces play the same part in aiding the eye to take in the meaning of the print as do the black letters.

The overall quantity of nuclear weapons in the world continues to decline slowly.

We have produced some good walkers and saunterers, and some noted climbers; but as a staple recreation, as a daily practice, the mass of the people dislike and despise walking.

In fact, the United States is building up its trident nuclear sub fleet in the Pacific, based at Bangor, Washington to build up its capabilities to wage nuclear war.

Especially in the case of India and Pakistan, it's very clear that significant parts of the elites in both countries view having nuclear weapons as a ticket to prestige.

There is an international treaty framework for this. It's the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Most countries in the world are members of the treaty.

Before the bud swells, before the grass springs, before the plough is started, comes the sugar harvest. It is sequel of the bitter frost; a sap run is the sweet goodbye of winter.

Be dangerous and unpredictable. And make a lot of noise.

In Europe and Britain they seem to be much more accepting and embracing of older bands, whereas in America if you've been out for three years, you're old, and I think that attitude stinks.