Eastern Quotes

“The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:
The moon is within me, and so is the sun.
The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it.
So long as man clamors for the I and the Mine, his works are as naught:
When all love of the I and the Mine is dead, then the work of the Lord is done.
For work has no other aim than the getting of knowledge:
When that comes, then work is put away.
The flower blooms for the fruit: when the fruit comes, the flower withers.
The musk is in the deer, but is seeks it not within itself: it wanders in quest of grass.”
― Kabir

“It is not easy for students to realize that to ask, as they often do, whether God exists and is merciful, just, good, or wrathful, is simply to project anthropomorphic concepts into a sphere to which they do not pertain. As the Upaniṣads declare: 'There, words do not reach.' Such queries fall short of the question. And yet—as the student must also understand—although that mystery is regarded in the Orient as transcendent of all thought and naming, it is also to be recognized as the reality of one’s own being and mystery. That which is transcendent is also immanent. And the ultimate function of Oriental myths, philosophies, and social forms, therefore, is to guide the individual to an actual experience of his identity with that; tat tvam asi ('Thou art that') is the ultimate word in this connection.

By contrast, in the Western sphere—in terms of the orthodox traditions, at any rate, in which our students have been raised—God is a person, the person who has created this world. God and his creation are not of the same substance. Ontologically, they are separate and apart. We, therefore, do not find in the religions of the West, as we do in those of the East, mythologies and cult disciplines devoted to the yielding of an experience of one’s identity with divinity. That, in fact, is heresy. Our myths and religions are concerned, rather, with establishing and maintaining an experience of relationship—and this is quite a different affair. Hence it is, that though the same mythological images can appear in a Western context and an Eastern, it will always be with a totally different sense. This point I regard as fundamental.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Dimension - Comparative Mythology

“Protestantism harbors within it certain elements – just as the Great Reformer himself harbored such elements within his personality. I am thinking here of a sentimentality, a trancelike self-hypnosis that is not European, that is foreign and hostile to our active hemisphere’s law of life. Just look at him, this Luther. Look at the portraits, both as a young man and later. What a skull, what cheekbones, what a strange set to the eyes. My friend, that is Asia. I would be surprised, would be astonished, if Wendish-Slavic-Sarmatian blood was not at work there, and if it was not this massive phenomenon of a man – and who would deny him that – who proved to be a fatal weight placed on one of the two precariously balanced scales of your nation, on the Eastern scale, which caused – and still causes – the Western scale to fly heavenward.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“If you ask today what art is, what its function is, what the meaning of art is and why one should create art, the answer given oftentimes by Western philosophers of art and those who special- ize in modern aesthetics is ‘‘art for art’s sake.’’ The modern response is that you just create art for the sake of art; but this was never the answer of traditional civilizations where one created art for both the sake of attainment of inner perfection and for human need in the deepest sense—because the needs of man are not only physical, they are also spiritual. We are as much in need of beauty as of the air that we breathe.”
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr, در جست‌وجوی امر قدسي

“I am Indonesian. I don't buy fear of western ghosts.
But when you deal with a giant garagasi of sumatera,
there's no word worth enough to express the eeriness.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Easterners get excited if the train arrives on time. Westerners deem such an event implicit. What for some represents a trivial circumstance, is for others a festival.”
― Vizi Andrei, Economy of Truth: Practical Maxims and Reflections

“Western governments use thermal heating standards for public protection from the damaging effects of wireless radio frequency (RF) radiation. Eastern governments use biological standards that are much lower due to the extensive long term radiation damage that has been seen to occur in humans at the western thermal heating standard.”
― Steven Magee

“At the very core of connection, our homes fill a basic psychological need for shelter and safety. But they should do a lot more than that. They should provide connection with others and a sense of belonging, space for rest and replenishment. If your home does not satisfy these needs, it will create disharmony in your life.”
― Maureen K. Calamia, Creating Luminous Spaces: Use the Five Elements for Balance and Harmony in Your Home and in Your Life

“In the Kingdom of the East, the male heart, like the orb at the end of a pendulum, swung from one extreme to the other. Oscillating between overplayed adoration to overplayed contempt, dangling over the emotional detritus that just the day before had been passion, men loved too much, raged too much, hated too much, always too much.”
― Elif Shafak, Havva'nın Üç Kızı