— Spinoza, last line of Ethics  <link>

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

— Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning  <link>

— Simone Weil  <link>

— Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be  <link>

— Seneca  <link>

— Epictetus  <link>

— Author unknown [via]  <link>

A few harmless flakes working together can unleash an avalanche of destruction.

— Author unknown [via]  <link>

— Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There  <link>

— Leonid Ouspensky, The Meaning of Icons [via]  <link>

Buddha kept silence.

After a while the philosopher rose up gently, made a solemn bow and thanked Buddha saying: “With your loving kindness, I have cleared away all my delusions and entered the true path.”

When the philosopher had left, Ananda, a senior disciple of Buddha, inquired: “O, Blessed one, what hath this philosopher attained?”

Buddha replied: “A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip!”

— Author unknown (Paul Reps, ed., Zen Flesh, Zen Bones) [via]  <link>

In the physical world, we become aware of our bodies through transactions with other phenomena. We hear our voices via the vibration of air, we see our faces via the bending of light, and we mark our comings and goings via the signs we leave on the furniture of our everyday lives. Breath is as essential attribute of one’s person, whose existence we may only infer through other media: the sight of our chest rising and falling, the sound of air rushing into our sinuses, the disturbance of the atmosphere near our skin. We mentally connect this evidence-of-breath into a coherent whole, and then label it “my breath”. Yet what distinguishes “my breath” from mere air and, further, what distinguishes this breath from my person?

— Scott Snibbe, description to the work of art Blow Up [via]  <link>