Author: Jennifer Sien

“We can condition our bodies and minds to happiness with the five practices of letting go, inviting positive seeds, mindfulness, concentration, and insight.” ― Thích Nhất Hạnh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering 

“We ruminate on suffering, regret, and sorrow. We chew on them, swallow them, bring them back up, and eat them again and again. If we’re feeding our suffering while we’re walking, working, eating, or talking, we are making ourselves victims of the ghosts of the past, of the future, or our worries in the present. We’re not living our lives.” ― Thích Nhất Hạnh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering 

“Keep thy heart (or imagination) with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.” – Prov. 4:23

“I think that we must examine our history and try to see whether, beneath what has already occurred, there are not additional layers of phenomena waiting to be revealed; whether some aspects of life that used to be constrained by the old sacrificial system are not going to flourish, other domains of knowledge, other ways of living.” — René Girard

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now … to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries —realists of a larger reality.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“The only true voyage of discovery … would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.” — Marcel Proust

“I wonder if some aspect of human nature evolved in the context of competing packs. We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob.… What’s to stop an online mass of anonymous but connected people from suddenly turning into a mean mob, just like masses of people have time and time again in the history of every human culture?” — Jaron Lanier, computer scientist and philosopher

“If individuals are naturally inclined to desire what their neighbors possess, or to desire what their neighbors even simply desire, this means that rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relations. This rivalry, if not thwarted, would permanently endanger harmony and even the survival of all human communities.” — René Girard

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.” — Milan Kundera