Henry David Thoreau Quotes

In Eastern culture, people see ghosts, people talk about ghosts... it's just accepted. And in Western culture it's just not.

And inasmuch as feeling, the East's gift, Is quick and transient,- comes, and lo! is gone, While Northern thought is slow and durable.

But in the West it is very easy to dissolve the ego. So whenever a Western seeker reaches an understanding that ego is the problem he can easily dissolve it, more easily than any Eastern seeker. This is the paradox - in the West ego is taught, in the East egolessness is taught. But in the West it is easy to dissolve the ego, in the East it is very difficult.

In Western dream interpretation, it's often connected to psychotherapy and looking at the personality and what's going on in your life. In Eastern dream telling, many times there's this idea of a special gift. And without this gift, you could study and study, but you'd never really become an effective dream teller.

I was born Muslim, but for a large part of my life, I wasn't necessarily raised Muslim. My father always kept everything around us, from Western philosophy to Eastern philosophy.

Europe, in legend, has always been the home of subtle philosophical discussion; America was the land of grubby pragmatism.

Companies in the East put a lot more emphasis on human relationships, while those from the West focus on the product, the bottom line. Westerners appear to have more of a need for achievement, while in the East there's more need for affiliation.

The East is very mysterious to Westerners. Even post-Cold War, it's still an unknown entity.

There is an enormous difference between Russia and Western Europe.

I think being idle is quite hard for me to do.

Talk does not cook rice.

It is urgently necessary that we recognize our own limitations as a moral and ideological force among the Asiatic peoples. Our political philosophy and our patterns for living have very little applicability to masses of people in Asia. They may be all right for us, with our highly developed political traditions running back into the centuries and with our peculiarly favorable geographic position; but they are simply not practical or helpful, today, for most of the people in Asia.

The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner

If a triangle could speak, it would say, in like manner, that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular. Thus each would ascribe to God its own attributes, would assume itself to be like God, and look on everything else as ill-shaped.

Why is this polarization in America? Why is there these very different views about the world? Part of it is that there are very different worlds that people are inhabiting.

… the Russian is a delightful person till he tucks in his shirt. As an Oriental he is charming. It is only when he insists upon being treated as the most easterly of western peoples, instead of the most westerly of easterns, that he becomes a racial anomaly extremely difficult to handle.

I find that the hardest work in the world... is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.

The idea that there is a difference between East and West is nonsense. You both hand over your card with two hands. If someone were to give me a million pounds, I couldn't care if they handed it to me within their toes.

My mother came from a very affluent background, very Westernized, while my father was more Eastern. So I've had a very good blend of the East and the West. I guess this has been extremely helpful in making my career and the way I function.

American and French culture are really, really different, but in a way it's funny.

English sense has toiled, but Hindoo wisdom never perspired.

I like to wake up at six o'clock in the morning so I have a very long morning, so I have time to meditate. I can really tell that it makes a difference - the days I don't have meditation and the days when I do.

Anyone who has crossed from the district of Bolkhov into that of Zhizdra will probably have been struck by the sharp difference between the natives of the provinces of Orel and Kaluga.

You can't live your life in a state of profundity, because you're never going to get anything done, and you're just profound.

People everywhere talk about Islam and the West. Presumably that has some relationship to reality, that these are entities that have some meaning and they do. Of course the core ofthat reality is differences in religion.