Chogyam Trungpa Quotes

I could be worried about it if I had the wrong attitude. I don't think that I want my life and my daily occurrences to influence the direction. I don't want my daily life or my happiness to be a direct influence on music or my sadness.

I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.

I try not to get impressed. I just try to look at what I see.

The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests of the desire to know-it involves suppression of hopes and fears, loves and hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, without preconceptions, without bias, without any wish except to see it as it is, and without any belief that what it is must be determined by some relation, positive or negative, to what we should like it to be, or to what we can easily imagine it to be.

The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind change. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity.

Separate the story - your story - from facts.

Don't be led away by those howls about realism. Remember-pine woods are just as real as pigsties and a darn sight pleasanter to be in.

Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional. The person who truely loves does so because of a decision to love. This person has made a commitment to be loving whether or not the loving feeling is present. ...Conversely, it is not only possible but necessary for a loving person to avoid acting on feelings of love.

The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.

Don't seek to have events happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do happen, and all will be well with you.

But look within and watch the stuff coming up-restlessness, anxiety, impatience, pain-just watch it come up and don't get involved. Much to your surprise, it will simply go away. It rises, it passes away. As simple as that. There is another word for self-discipline. It is patience.

I suffered no pain, my hunger had taken the edge off; instead I felt pleasantly empty, untouched by everything around me and happy to be unseen by all. I put my legs up on the bench and leaned back, the best way to feel the true well-being of seclusion. There wasn't a cloud in my mind, nor did I feel any discomfort, and I hadn't a single unfulfilled desire or craving as far as my thought could reach. I lay with open eyes in a state of utter absence from myself and felt deliciously out of it.

Politicians generally form alliances and not friendships. Individuals and institutions achieve their ends through continual barter. But deals are not bonds. Indeed, intense emotional involvement with anything - with issues, ideology, a woman, even a family - can be a handicap, not only consuming valuable time, but more importantly, reducing flexibility and the capacity for detached calculation needed to take maximum advantage of continually changing circumstances.

The mind we have when we practice zazen is the great mind: we don't try to see anything; we stop conceptual thinking; we stop emotional activity; we just sit. Whatever happens to us, we are not bothered. We just sit. It is like something happening in the great sky. Whatever kind of bird flies through it, the sky doesn't care. That is the mind transmitted from Buddha to us.

Art will liberate itself from the needs and desires of men. No longer will we paint a forest ora horseas we like oras theyappear to us, but as they really are.

The key to contentment was to never ask why; she had learned that long ago.

A deliberate attitude that you have to hold in your mind as one of the basic rules of yoga is to remain even-minded and cheerful.

Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment.

Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part...and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.

The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning.

Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional.

Never fall in love with an idea. They're whores.

Put personal ambition away from you, and then you will find consolation in living or in dying, whatever may happen to you.

Modern liberalism, for most liberals is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow.

Emotion did not play a part in truth, only reality did.