Ned Vizzini Quotes

Nothing matters, but it's perhaps more comfortable to keep calm and not interfere with other people.

There's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place for it.

The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling! Just drawing back and drawing in; becoming narcissistic.

It occurred to me that I was unhappy. And it didn’t feel so very terrible. No urgency, nothing. I could slip out of my life on a slow wave like this—it didn’t matter. I don’t have to be happy. All I have to do is hold on to something and wait.

Clear mind is like the full moon in the sky. Sometimes clouds come and cover it, but the moon is always behind them. Clouds go away, then the moon shines brightly. So don't worry about clear mind: it is always there. When thinking comes, behind it is clear mind. When thinking goes, there is only clear mind. Thinking comes and goes, comes and goes, You must not be attached to the coming or the going.

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.

Tolerance is only another name for indifference.

I'm too tired most of the time. Why do I have to take a stand on everything? Sometimes, I'm just not mad at it.

If you are a very ordinary human being, nothing affects you, nothing bothers you, and nothing troubles you. That's how I live my life.

The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.

The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.

For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker.

Vex not thy spirit at the course of things; they heed not thy vexation. How ludicrous and outlandish is astonishment at anything that may happen in life.

He who, calm and clear as the moon, hankers no more for continuity-he is holy.

When you're comfortable, you're not necessarily inclined to care about things that are contributing to your comfort. It's difficult.

Stop, stop. Do not speak. The ultimate truth is not even to think.

Be content with doing calmly the little which depends upon yourself, and let all else be to you as if it were not.

There are times in life when the most comfortable thing is to do nothing at all. Things happen to you and you just let them happen.

Meditation is not contemplation because it is not thinking at all - consistent, inconsistent, crazy, sane. It is not thinking at all; it is witnessing. It is just sitting silently deep within yourself, looking at whatsoever is happening inside and outside both. Outside there is traffic noise, inside there is also traffic noise - the traffic in the head. So many thoughts - trucks and buses of thoughts and trains and airplanes of thoughts, rushing in every direction. But you are simply sitting aloof, unconcerned, watching everything with no evaluation.

The only way to cultivate a quiet mind is by planting seeds of silence.

I should not mind anything at all.

But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.

You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.

Indifference is an excellent substitute for patience.