Identity Quote by Peter Matthiessen

“In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.” quote by Peter Matthiessen — Download Open image

“In zazen, one is one's present self, what one was, and what one will be, all at once.”

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Figures dark beneath their loads pass down the far bank of the river, rendered immortal by the streak of sunset upon their shoulders

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I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.

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The great stillness in these landscapes that once made me restless seeps into me day by day, and with it the unreasonable feeling that…

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“...experience was static in the valley; it was older than time itself, for time was a thing of but two generations, dated by moons…

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“The central feature of the practice of meditation and hard work known as Zen is that, as Matthiessen says, it “has no patience with mysticism, far less the occult.” Nor does it have any time with moralism, the prescriptions or distortions we would impose on the world, obscuring it from our view. It asks, it insists rather, that we take…

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Be light, light, light - full of light!

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For some time I watch the coming of the night? Above is the glistening galaxy of childhood, now hidden in the Western world by…

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“Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can be elegant and very beautiful but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts—or predetermined forms—it cannot fly. Excepting those masters who transcend their craft—great medieval and Renaissance artisans, for example, or nameless artisans of traditional cultures as far back as the caves who were also spontaneous unselfconscious artists.…

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Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty…

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“In the book of Job, the Lord demands, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” “I was there!”-surely that is the answer to God’s question. For no matter how the universe came into being, most of the atoms in these fleeting assemblies that we think of as our bodies have been in existence since the beginning.…

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I meditate for the last time on this mountain that is bare, though others all around are white with snow. Like the bare peak of the koan, this one is not different from myself. I know this mountain because I am this mountain, I can feel it breathing at this moment, as its grass tops stray against the snows. If…

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Explore all 99 Peter Matthiessen quotes

More Identity quotes

I don't doubt that straight white men have identity issues and identity complexes and struggle with defining themselves.

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In the hearing world, I'm constantly having to lip-read and trying to understand what's going on. Sign language is so beautiful. It gives you…

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I think the next 50 years are going to present the human race with challenges that so far exceed the limitations of geopolitical boundaries or nationalist identity. We're going to be up against challenges that we can barely fathom at this point. So how we embrace them and deal with them will define a great many things about where we…

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You have expressive nationalism, I mean very identity driven, which shaped each other a lot of that in the Middle East.

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Family over friends, because real friends are family

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I think everybody, or the great majority of human beings, have this aspiration to become other: to live a different identity, at least for…

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The language we share is at the core of our identity as citizens, and our ticket to full participation in American political life. We…

S. I. Hayakawa

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Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own…

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I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not "true" because we're hungry for another kind of truth: the mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about someone…

Orson Scott Card

“In the worldly life, due to maadakta (intoxication of the ego of ‘I am Chandubhai’), one has completely lost awareness of everything about one’s self. Everything in the worldly life is nothing but intoxication. The food is intoxicating, the senses are intoxicating. [Therefore] Go to the one, who is without mada (pride), the one who has destroyed all intoxication. There…

Dada Bhagwan