Eliot Pattison Quotes
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What is the way of human life, the student asked. An open-eyed man falling down a well, the master replied.
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It is a mistake to think of courage as something you show to others. True courage is only something you show to yourself.
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Shan stared at his glass, then lifted it under his nose. It was the closest he would knowingly get to tasting the hard liquor. It was not because it would violate the vows of the monks, which he had not taken, but because somehow it felt as though it would violate his teachers who still sat behind prison wire in Lhadrung.
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He said you must always step forward from where you stand.
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A man’s life, Choje taught his monks, did not move in a linear progression, with each day an equal chit on the calendar of existence. Rather it moved from defining moment to defining moment, marked by the decisions that roiled the soul.
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Investigations, meditations, careers, relationships were much the same, he mused. They failed because no one thought to ask the right question.
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You need to let the spirits have their way Shan.
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He looked calmer somehow. It wasn’t peace of mind he had found, but maybe a new deliberation.
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The more one understands the world...the harder it is to obtain Buddhahood.
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Who's to know what makes a bird wake up and decide to change its song? It was written that our world would change and it changed.
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Sometimes, Shan's father had told him, people can live eighty and ninety years and only briefly, once or twice at most, glimpse the true things of life, the things that are the essence of the planet and of mankind. Sometimes people died without ever seeing a true thing. But, he had assured Shan, you can always find true things if you just know where to look.
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If you are not careful your soul will wear out long before your body.
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I tell them that the only peace you find up on a mountain is the peace you bring with you.