Stephen Batchelor Quotes

40 quotes in 907 categories

• A compassionate heart still feels anger, greed, jealousy, and other such emotions. But it accepts them for what they are with equanimity, and cultivates the… Accepting
• The greatest threat to compassion is the temptation to succumb to fantasies of moral superiority. Compassion
• Without a rigorous, self-critical discourse, one risks lapsing into pious platitudes and unexamined generalizations. Critical
• A secular approach is not a dumbing down, it's not reductively identifying Buddhism with one or two particular techniques of meditation, but it is actually… Approach
• Consciousness is an emergent, contingent, and impermanent phenomenon. It has no magical capacity to break free from the field of events out of which it… Break
• While 'Buddhism' suggests another belief system, 'dharma practice' suggests a course of action. The four ennobling truths are not propositions to believe; they are challenges… Act
• Yet Gotama's Dhamma is more than just a series of axioms. It is to be lived rather than simply adopted and believed in. It entails… Adopted
• Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back… Action
• In taking the everyday details of life for granted, we fail to appreciate the extraordinary fact that we are conscious at all. All
• We took a bus to the nearby monastery of one of the last great Tang dynasty Chan masters, Yun-men. Yun-men was known for his pithy… Admired
• The first step in this process of mindfulness is radical self-acceptance . Acceptance
• How extraordinary it is to be here at all. Awareness of death can jolt us awake to the sensuality of existence. Breath is no longer… Air
• The denial of "self" challenges only the notion of a static self independent of body and mind-not the ordinary sense of ourself as a person… Ambiguity
• The art of dharma practice requires commitment, technical accomplishment, and imagination. As with all arts, we will fail to realize its full potential if any… Accomplishment
• We could decide simply to remain absorbed in the mysterious, unformed, free-play of reality. This would be the choice of the mystic who seeks to… Abnegation
• [Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising… Antidote
• The Four Noble Truths are pragmatic rather than dogmatic. They suggest a course of action to be followed rather than a set of dogmas to… Action
• To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for… Capacity
• What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176) Atheism
• The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities,… Certainty

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