Some quotes:

  1. Would that my request were granted, That God gave me what I wished for; Would that God consented to crush me, Loosed His hand and cut me off. Then this would be my consolation, As I writhed in unsparing pains: That I did not suppress my words against the Holy One. (Job 6:8-10, JPS 1985)
  2. Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. (Salinger)
  3. The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one. (Salinger)
  4. The perfect teaching is just where you are right now, what you’re engaging with right now, what’s troubling you right now. That’s the perfect teaching. And the perfect student - is you. (a monk)
  5. Great is the matter of life and death. Life slips quickly by. Time waits for no one. Wake up! Wake up! Don’t waste a moment. (Dogen??)
  6. The single most important lesson I’ve learned in the past 20 years is that the irreducible heart of what matters is suffering. (Ball)
  7. […] Even without money, I am not poor. I paraphrase a haiku by Basho and tell him that even though the electricity has been shut off, the moon still shines in my window. (Thay)
  8. He gazes into the heart of darkness unflinchingly, with an intense fixity of purpose. He is prepared to accompany the damned into the pit. (Padmakara Translation Group)
  9. I love the Vietnamese people, and I tried my best to help them during the war. But I also saw the American boys in Vietnam as victims. I did not look at them with rancor, and I suffered much less. This is the kind of suffering many of us have overcome, and the teaching is born out of that suffering, not from academic studies. I survived for Brother Nhat Tri and for so many others who died in order to bring the message of forgiveness, love, and understanding. I share this so they will not have died in vain. […] During his lifetime, the Buddha suffered too. There were plots to compete with him and even to kill him. One time, when he had a wound in his leg and people tried to help him, he said it was only a small wound, and he did his best to minimize the pain. Another time, five hundred of his monks went off to set up an alternative Sangha, and he took it very much in stride. Finally, the difficulties were overcome. (Thay)

Kierkegaard:

  1. You, to whom my speech is addressed, was that the case with you? When you saw, far off, the heavy fate approaching, did you not say to the mountains, ‘hide me’, to the hills, ‘fall on me’? Or if you were stronger, did your feet nevertheless not drag along the way? […] Not so Abraham, gladly, boldly, trustingly he answered out loud ‘here I am’. We read further: ‘And Abraham rose up early in the morning.’ He hurried as though to some celebration […] he also knew that no sacrifice was too great when God demanded it - and he drew the knife.
  2. For the knight will then, in the first place, have the strength to concentrate the whole of his life’s content and the meaning of his reality in a single wish.
  3. He has grasped the deep secret that even in loving another one should be sufficient unto oneself. […] There was a person who also believed he had made the movement, but time went by, the princess did something else, she married, say, a prince, and his soul lost the resilience of resignation. He knew that he had not made the movement correctly; for one who has infinitely resigned is enough unto himself. The knight does not conceal his resignation, he keeps it, just as young as in the first instance, he never lets it go, simply because he has made the movement infinitely.
  4. Temporality, finitude is what it all turns on. I am able by my own strength to renounce everything, and then find peace and repose in the pain; I can put up with everything […] I can still save my soul so long as it is more important for me that my love of God should triumph in me than my worldly happiness.
  5. The last movement, the paradoxical movement of faith I cannot perform […] what everyone can do, on the other hand, is perform the infinite movement of resignation.

Victor Frankl

  1. Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscious commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge.
  2. Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish […] We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. […] 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. […] If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So if therapists wish to foster their patients’ mental health, they should not be afraid to create a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one’s life.
  3. Let us now consider what we can do if a patient asks what the meaning of his life is. […] To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion: ‘Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?’ There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein, he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
  4. The more one forgets himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to live - the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.
  5. It may well be that an individual’s impulse to take his own life would have been overcome had he been aware of some meaning and purpose worth living for.
  6. Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.
  7. Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz.