A person who does not have stability of mind is an unstable dinghy. In this struggle of life, I will confront all the challenges with truth and strength, and will never waver. Cowardliness is an eveil which I should banish from my life.
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My Twenty-One Years in the Fiji Islands (English translation by J.D. Kelly & U.K. Singh, Fiji Museum, 1991)Totaram Sanadhya
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The sex-energy is the greatest power of the mind and the body. This is the supreme strength in the human body, embodying all powers and assuming all forms. The mind and the body receive their strength and life from this sex-energy. Instead of allowing this Shakti or energy to become the gross seminal fluid, it is to be conserved, it is to be converted into a form of subtle energy called “Ojas” and thus made a source of spiritual life instead of the cause of physical death. With the extinction of sexual desires, the mind is released of its most powerful bond. Sex-energy moves towards two main directions, viz., one is downward and the other is upward. It takes the downward course in the form of gross sexual enjoyment; but when one tries to observe Brahmacharya (celibacy) in thought, word and deed, it takes the upward course. When the sex-energy always takes the downward course in a person, such a person becomes weak mentally and physically. From such a man or woman we cannot expect anything great and original. Sexual life dissipates the powers of the mind and the body.
Swami Narayanananda
Pride and cowardliness are one and the same because what is spoken under the name pride is ordinarily cowardliness. False pride conjures a high conception of one’s own worth. The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing, and he is actually struggling not with people but with God, because he wants to do it with his own power; he does not want to sneak out of something, what he wants is to set the task as high as possible and then to finish it by himself, satisfied with his own consciousness and his own approval. The proud person must concentrate all his thought in order to see the right; he must will it, because he is too proud to admit that people could be in the right in opposition to him, even if no one could convince him of that.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Cowardliness is the most pleasant of all passions; it is not noisy and strident, but quiet and suggestive and yet lustful, it attracts all the passions to itself, since in its association with them it is extremely engaging, knows how to maintain a friendship with them, and buries itself deep in the soul like somnolent vapor of stagnant water, which pestiferous breezes and deceptive phantoms rise, while the vapor still remains. What cowardliness fears most is the making of a resolution, because a resolution always disperses the vapor for a moment. The power cowardliness prefers to conspire with is time, because neither time nor cowardliness finds that there is any reason to hurry.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Without the faculty of forgetting, our past would weigh so heavily on our present that we should not have the strength to confront another moment, still less to live through it. Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.
Emil Cioran
Kenzaburo Oe has devoted his life to taking certain subjects seriously — victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the struggles of the people of Okinawa, the challenges of the disabled, the discipline of the scholarly life — while not appearing to take himself seriously at all. Although he is known in Japan as much for being a gadfly activist as for being one of the country’s most celebrated writers, in person Oe is more of a delightful wag
Kenzaburo Oe
Sanadhya, Totaram
Sand, George
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