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Grasping Quotes

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Grasping Quotes

“Oh, noble child, everything is severing the mind. As for the mind, it is severing pride. There is nothing whatsoever that is not included in pride. If one simply understands that it is merely the production of pride, then, for example, one is like a thief in an empty house: by simply recognizing [the situation], grasping is impossible. Having correctly understood, there is no practice with an intentional objective. Because it crushes any hesitations (mi phod), it is explained as Chöd.”

PrideSimileGraspingTibetan BuddhismChödSelf AttachmentSupplementary Chapter
Book:Making the Old New Again and Again: Legitimation and Innovation in the Tibetan Buddhist Chöd Tradition
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“People don't dare let go of the mind, they grasp onto the mind. They can let go of the objects of the mind, but they don't dare to let go of the mind. Why? We're afraid of falling into a place where we think there will be nothing to feel, to touch, to pick up, afraid we'll have nothing left. But emptiness doesn't mean nothingness.”

MindEmptinessGrasping
Book:Zen Battles: Modern Commentary on the Teachings of Master Linji
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“In literature and in art, alike, this gloomy fashion of regarding Death has been characteristic of Christianity. Death has been painted as a skeleton grasping a scythe, a grinning skull, a threatening figure with terrible face and uplifted dart, a bony scarecrow shaking an hourglass - all that could alarm and repel has been gathered round this rightly-named King of Terrors.”

Has BeensArtFacesLiteratureChristianityFashionFiguresKingsTerribleRoundsTerrorSymbolsCharacteristicsThreateningShakingAlarmsSkullsGloomySkeletonsGraspingGrinningScarecrowHourglassScythes
Book:The Theosophical Writings of Annie Besant
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“The American Colossus was fiercely intent on appropriating and exploiting the riches of all continents - grasping with both hands, reaping where he had not sown, wasting what he thought would last forever. New railroads were opening new territory. The exploiters were pushing farther and farther into the wilderness. The man who could get his hands on the biggest slice of natural resources was the best citizen. Wealth and virtue were supposed to trot in double harness.”

MenHandsLastsNaturalWealthForeverVirtueLandHe ManCitizensResourcesRichesOpeningPushingWildernessTerritoryContinentsNatural ResourcesRailroadsGraspingHarnessNew TerritoryColossus
Book:Breaking New Ground
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“Excellence is THE trend of the '80s. Walk into any shopping mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the best-sellers such as Garfield Gets Spayed, and you'll see a half-dozen books telling you how to be excellent: In Search of Excellence, Finding Excellence, Grasping Hold of Excellence, Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night So the Cleaning Personnel Don't Steal It, etc.”

BookNightWalksHalfFindingsHumorousExcellenceStealingExcellentEtcTrendsShoppingDozenCleaning80sBookstoresMallsGraspingSellersRacksPersonnelBest SellersGarfield
Author:Dave Barry
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“We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or consciousness in order to have versions of their own that are worthy of serious study. We have set ourselves too much apart, grasping for definitions that will distinguish man from all other life on the planet. We must rejoin the great stream of life from whence we arose and strive to see within it the seeds of all we are and all we may become.”

MenWayNeedsShouldMindHumansMayUseOrderLanguageRealizingConsciousnessStudyToo MuchPlanetsSeriousToolsStriveStartingDefinitionsWorthySeedsVersionsDataStreamsAssumptionOrganismsGraspingInterpretingHuman Language
Book:Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind
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“The average mind is slow in grasping a truth, but when the most thoroughly organized, centralized institution, maintained at an excessive national expense, has proven a complete social failure, the dullest must begin to question its right to exist. The time is past when we can be content with our social fabric merely because it is "ordained by divine right," or by the majesty of the law.”

MindPastLawSocialDivineInstitutionsAverageOrganizedExpensesFabricProvenMajestyGraspingDivine RightAverage Minds
Book:Anarchism: Top Crime Collections
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“As a painter, cursed or blessed with a terrible and vital sensuousness, I must look for wisdom with my eyes. I repeat, with my eyes, for nothing could be more ridiculous or irrelevant than a 'philosophical conception painted purely intellectually without the terrible fury of the senses grasping each visible form of beauty and ugliness.”

LooksEyeFormTerriblePhilosophicalBlessedRidiculousSensesPainterRepeatsVisibleConceptionIrrelevantUglinessFuryCursedGrasping
Book:Max Beckmann in exile
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“Bold ideas, unjustified anticipations, and speculative thought, are our only means for interpreting nature: our only organon, our only instrument, for grasping her. And we must hazard them to win our prize. Those among us who are unwilling to expose their ideas to the hazard of refutation do not take part in the scientific game.”

MeanIdeasGamesWinningInstrumentsPrizeAnticipationUnwillingHazardsGraspingInterpretingRefutationUnjustified
Book:The Logic of Scientific Discovery
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“Institutionalized desublimation thus appears to be an aspect of the "conquest of transcendence" achieved by the one-dimensional society. Just as this society tends to reduce, and even absorb opposition (the qualitative difference!) in the realm of politics and higher culture, so it does in the instinctual sphere. The result is the atrophy of the mental organs for grasping the contradictions and the alternatives and, in the one remaining dimension of technological rationality, the Happy Consciousness comes to prevail.”

DoeCultureDifferencesResultsConsciousnessHigherAspectAlternativesRealmsDimensionsOppositionContradictionSpheresOrgansTechnologicalRationalityConquestTranscendenceGraspingThis SocietyAtrophyQualitative
Book:One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
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“In the early days the Cubism' method of grasping an object was to go round and round it. The Futurists declared that one had to get inside it. In my opinion the two views can be reconciled in a poetic cognition of the world. But to the very fact that they appealed to the creative depths in the painter by awakening in him hidden forces which were intuitive and vitalizing, the Futurist theories did more than the Cubist principles to open up unexplored and boundless horizons.”

WorldTwoFactsForceViewsOpinionPrinciplesCreativeObjectsTheoryMethodDepthRoundsAwakeningPainterPoeticHorizonIntuitiveBoundlessCognitionGraspingUnexploredFuturist
Author:Gino Severini
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“Stirner and Nietzsche [adopt] a mode of thinking which is personal, introspective, and which while often operating on alternative systems of belief and action does so only as a means of better grasping one dominant goal the patterns of individual redemption. Stirner and Nietzsche are not primarily interested in critique as such. ... Their work is too egoistically compelled for them ever to employ the external world as more than the repository for a series of projections of their own.”

ThinkingWorldMeanDoeActionIndividualBeliefGoalSeriesPatternsRedemptionAlternativesDominantCompelledProjectionCritiqueIntrospectiveGraspingBelief And Action
Author:John Carroll
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“Ambition is frequently the only refuge which life has left to the denied or mortified affections. We chide at the grasping eye, the daring wing, the soul that seems to thirst for sovereignty only, and know not that the flight of this ambitious bird has been from a bosom or home that is filled with ashes.”

KnowsHas BeensSoulHomeSeemsEyeLeftAmbitionBirdFilledWingsAffectionFlightDeniedDaringAmbitiousAshesRefugeThirstSovereigntyBosomsGrasping
Book:Egeria: Or Voices of Thought and Counsel, for the Woods and Wayside
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“The broad rich acres of our agricultural plains have been long preserved by nature to become her untrammeled gift to a people civilized and free, upon which should rest, in well-distributed ownership, the numerous homes of enlightened, equal, and fraternal citizens... Nor should our vast tracts of so-called desert lands be yielded up to the monopoly of corporations or grasping individuals, as appears to be much the tendency under the existing statute.”

PeopleShouldWellsLongHas BeensHomePoliticsIndividualEconomyRichLandCitizensEqualTendenciesCorporationsLiberalismEnlightenedCivilizedBroadsOwnershipMonopolyGraspingAcresStatutesFraternal
Author:Grover Cleveland
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“The blood of Abraham, God's father of the chosen, still flows in the veins of Arab, Jew, and Christian, and too much of it has been spilled in grasping for the inheritance of the revered patriarch in the Middle East. The spilled blood in the Holy Land still cries out to God--an anguished cry for peace.”

Has BeensStillsChristianReligionFatherToo MuchBloodLandMiddleCryHolyFlowJewEastChosenMiddle EastVeinsInheritanceAbrahamGraspingHoly LandPatriarch
Book:We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land
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“What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern?”

MenShouldHandsFormHorseWingsPatternsLegsCuriousConstructionBatsDiggingNatural SelectionGraspingMolesOrigin Of SpeciesPorpoises
Book:The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life
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“Computers are good at swift, accurate computation and at storing great masses of information. The brain, on the other hand, is notas efficient a number cruncher and its memory is often highly fallible; a basic inexactness is built into its design. The brain's strong point is its flexibility. It is unsurpassed at making shrewd guesses and at grasping the total meaning of information presented to it.”

HandsStrongMemoriesNumbersBrainInformationDesignComputerMassBuiltEfficientAccurateFlexibilityGraspingComputation
Author:Jeremy Campbell
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“The entrance into Zen is the grasping of one's essential nature. It is absolutely impossible, however, to come to a clear understanding of our essential nature by any intellectual or philosophical method. It is accomplished only by the experience of self-realization through zazen.”

SelfUnderstandingNatureClearImpossibleEssentialsIntellectualExperiencePhilosophicalMethodSelf RealizationRealizationAccomplishedEntrancesGrasping
Book:The Gateless Gate: The Classic Book of Zen Koans
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“Falling in love is very real, but I used to shake my head when people talked about soul mates, poor deluded individuals grasping at some supernatural ideal not intended for mortals but sounded pretty in a poetry book. Then, we met, and everything changed, the cynic has become the converted, the sceptic, an ardent zealot.”

PeopleBookRealSoulUsedFallIndividualLove IsPoorChangedMetsIdealsFalling In LoveTrue LoveMortalsShakesMatesLove At First SightSoul MateGraspingArdentDeludedCynicBeen In LoveI Fall In LoveScepticZealotFalling In Love With You
Author:E. A. Bucchianeri
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“The only times that we can have what we long for are those moments when we stop grasping for it. At such times, all things are possible: "to a mind that is 'still' the whole universe surrenders".”

MindLongStillsWholeMomentsUniverseMeditationAll ThingsSurrenderOnly TimeGrasping
Book:IF YOU MEET THE BUDDHA ON THE ROAD KILL HIM THE PILGRIMAGE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY PATIENTS
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“...Enduring comprises a strong activity of the soul, namely, a vigorous grasping of and clinging to the good; and only from this stout-hearted activity can the strength to support the physical and spiritual suffering of injury and death be nourished.”

SoulSpiritualSufferingStrongSupportActivityEndureInjuryHeartedVigorousClingingGraspingStout
Book:The four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance
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