Some Quotations

The point of Buddhist meditation is not to stop thinking, for cultivation of insight clearly requires intelligent use of thought and discrimination. What needs to be stopped is conceptualization that is compulsive, mechanical and unintelligent, that is, activity that is always fatiguing, usually pointless, and at times seriously harmful
Allan Wallace

As soon as you get any success you disappear up your own arse.
Thom Yorke (Radiohead)

...human emotions are the sparks that fly when 'truth' and 'fiction' collide.
Hirokazu Korieda (film maker)

For the truth is, however admirable mindfulness may be, however much peace, grounding, stability and self-acceptance it can bring, as an experience to be shared, it’s stultifyingly boring.
Judith Warner, New York Times opinion

Leisure is a form of stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality. Only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still cannot hear. Leisure is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion in the real.
Josef Pieper, "Leisure, the Basis of Culture" (1947)

...Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. John Keats, 1817

Thus to identify with a self is to be susceptible to the arising of hatred. If we think in terms of karma and rebirth, we have been prone to hatred for as long as we have been embodied human beings...Since our first human birth we have reacted with hatred to all those situations that threatened our continued existence. When a human being experiences this sense of being threatened, there is more at stake than territory or physical safety. We are afraid for our personal identity, our very sense of self, the sense of "I" that enables a human being to interact the form relationships...
Sangharakshita, Living with Kindness

The enlightenment experience is therefore not only one of illumination and freedom but also one of infinite and inexhaustible love, a love which has for object all sentient beings, and which manifests as uninterrupted activity in pursuit of their temporal and spiritual welfare.
Sangharakshita, The Three Jewels

Patience is bitter but the fruit is sweet.
Arabic saying

If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest or some guy on TV telling you what to do, then YOU DESERVE IT.
Frank Zappa