I remember I’ve never shared tears with someone that longed for (me) and loved me; I didn’t know how to be compassionate.” (The truth, the lies & the love, p. 76)
Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.
For some, reassessing concepts about truth and reality can be a scary proposition.
Smartass Disciple: Master, I don’t need a fairytale.I need you to tell me the truth. Master of Stupidity: It is not funny if you just found it. No drama if no lost at first.
Smartass Disciple : Master, why you keep telling about the truth? Nobody hears. Master of Stupidity : O Yea. They hear but don't listen. Anyway, no fun in silent.
Smartass Disciple: I've been searching for so long.I still can't find the truth. Master of Stupidity: Until you've lost and felt desperate, you won't be found.
I've come to the conclusion that liking a person we are required to have dealings with is not of paramount importance. But respect is crucial, on both sides, as is tolerance, and a depth of understanding of those influences that sculpt a character.
But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.
As much as some people would like to believe, for their own peace of mind, that the appearance of evil in this world had a clean cause, the truth was never that simple.
To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.
Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest - learning when it was better to lie, rather than to hurt someone with the truth.
But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished— behold!— all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile— and the return to an eternal rest.
Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss.
But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions.
ingenuity was apparently given man in order that he may supply himself in crises with shapes and sounds with which to guard himself from truth.
Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think…
The only way love can last a lifetime is if it's unconditional. The truth is this: love is not determined by the one being loved but rather by the one choosing to love.
It was there, in particular, that I confirmed the truth that love, which we cry up as the source of our pleasures, is nothing more than an excuse for them.
Truth to tell, the longer I live, the more I'm tempted to think that the only moderately worthwhile people in the world are you and I.
When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life.
