Nanamoli Thera Quotes

How is it I have the strength to carry my own weaknesses?

Unambiguous is nonexistent.

What we are not at all interested in may be what we are.

It is our eyes that blind us and our ears that deafen us.

Wandering across a city - walking often quite alone, down dark alleys, through unfrequented districts and debouching suddenly onto main thoroughfares where for a spell one follows the main stream, is adopted by a group "he has come where we come from, wants to go where we want to go". For a while it is true but the side streets are there. Pause in one of them for a moment, and the stream has moved on. So, as there is no catching up with the group, there is no more reason to return to the main street than to wander away from it... more alleys... more thoroughfares... Where shall we be sleeping tonight? And those odd encounters of eyes in lonely alleys...

Forgetting is a very useful kind of ignorance: it wipes the bad sums off our slates.

The five senses offer us five different ways of shutting out reality. What is intuition and what does it perceive?

Two demons: one who insists that what is to be inferred by verbal processes must correspond to experience; and one who 'insists that what cannot be arrived at by verbal processes cannot correspond to experience.

Ignorance screens the truth. It is on that screen that people paint pictures and write underneath their labels "god" and "not-god" and "theism.' and "atheism" .

Civilisation is the art of living in contact with other persons with the minimum of discomfort.

Where would I be (and what would happen to me), if I could see all round me and above and below at once ?

All the questions asked about death are wrongly put.

One of the most remarkable facts of this age is the negligible direct personal power which scientists have in the control of the world's affairs. The marvelous means they so successfully produce are always used by non-scientists against whom the scientists themselves seem to be powerless and even purposeless. What clever sheep they are.

In a syllogism (1. All men are mortal, 2. Socrates is a man, 3. Therefore Socrates is mortal), the generalization (all men are mortal) must have been arrived at by induction. No inductive process is ever absolutely certain. There is always the leap, the assumption, of generalizing and therefore one of the premises of a syllogism must have an element of uncertainty. So it cannot prove anything with certainty.

A syllogism is therefore a signpost pointing where to look for direct experience, but can inherently never give information that is 100% certain. But a syllogism (on metaphysical subjects) can also point to what can, inherently, never be experienced; then it is an anomaly.

Much of what is asserted as true is so asserted, not as a declaration of what the speaker knows but rather as a defence against doubt in the hope that the opposite proposition may be thereby excluded.

There are two ways of attempting to deal with the appalling difficulties of choice on the higher ethical levels (Truth/beauty/goodness; family/country, war/peace, principles/persons.. ): (1) one can attempt to justify a one-sided choice, and this is what philosophies of value and religions attempt to do through reason and faith (feeling,) respectively. But this always founders or is never safe from foundering. (2) Or the dialectic can be squarely faced in the fact that no one-sided solution of it is ever justifiable by reason or by faith. And here enters the question not of acceptance or refusal, nor of affirmation or denial, but of letting-go. The letting-go, however, is limited, in life at least (and without taking death into account) by the boundary of ability to let go.

From the 18th to the 20th Century it was the boast that human thought had at least come out of the dark woods of medieval superstition, credulity and obscurantism, into the sunshine of clear thinking where the dry breezes of skepticism blow unhindered. 'Fell the trees and level the hills that still obscure the view; let the winds drive off the mist' - they said. But now that much of this work has been accomplished it is beginning to be felt that there is no shade in all these flat plains of perpetual parching wind and sunshine, and through this desert no flooding Nile flows. There are those who, secretly, would like, if they could, to reconstruct the dim, wet, haunted woods before they die of thirst.

Authoritative people bore me: but what bores me even more are those swarms of little people who love authority and in virtue of whom the authority of the authoritative can be exercised.

When we are young the noise of general conversation seems much the most fun. When we grow up we discover the possibilities of the tete-a-tete. In maturity the monologue habit sets is. But now at last there is the chance to investigate the rich depth of the silence when the monologue is suspended.

It is no ipso facto escape from dogma to assert (knowingly or not) non-dogmatism dogmatically.
It is no ipso facto escape from credulity to believe in one's own scepticism.

How does the body come to be apprehended as a body? Why does it not fall apart into the seen and the heard, the smelt, the tasted and the touched?

Just as one can arrange bits of iron, etc, into a hermetically sealed box which imprison other pieces of matter, so one can arrange thoughts into a box too, which effectively imprisons other thoughts.