Quote

I think [imagination] very austere element of Buddhism is also linked with a strong antinatalist strain in the philosophy. The Buddha was enlightened when he destroyed the house of body and soul into which he would otherwise have been forever reborn. This is clearly antinatalism.

Quentin S. Crisp

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Quentin S. Crisp
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: January 1
Writer
Devonshire
Thinking
Forever
Element
Strong
Destroyed
House
Clearly
Austere
Also
Buddhism
Reborn
Body
Otherwise
Buddha
Soul
Elements
Strain
Would
Philosophy
Linked
Think
Imagination
Enlightened

More quotes by Quentin S. Crisp

Image
I do not think that my spiritual apprehensions are as dogmatically cultural as those of many people who have been brought up strictly in a particular tradition.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
It's true that Eastern philosophy and religion were not unknown to me as a child, since my father has explored much in that area, and written books more or less in that area, too.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
I have a bit of a struggle with some aspects of or forms of Buddhism, but Zen I find to be mainly congenial.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
There's a possible qualification I can make here about a non-pantheist god that is in some way tenable, and that is the idea of a god that has in some way discharged the universe from its own substance (I associate this with the word 'tzimtzum'), possibly even by a form of suicide - a suicide that might have been the Big Bang.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
[Someone] said that what I described as the Buddhist voice - the life-denying voice of censure and guilt - sounded to him very much like a Catholic voice. This is, indeed, a mystery, and it intrigues me, too.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
It would be hard to say that exactly, but antinatalism is a reality in my life, not just an interesting idea. I can feel it in the chilled and weary marrow of my bones.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
I grew up with tarot cards and the reading of tea leaves.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
Zen is influenced by Daoism, which is not so much a nature-religion in the animistic sense as a nature-philosophy in a cosmic sense.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
I feel like the seventies was a decade where things ran out, and where other things set in. There was just a lurking graininess and seediness about the decade, a slight grogginess of the hangover from the sixties.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
I feel that Nagai Kafu was a writer who cold stitch together apparently meaningless moments like these into a lyrical whole, and has enhanced my ability to do the same with my own life.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
When I think back on it, I have a sense of relaxation, as if in the seventies no one had to try to be anyone other than who they were. I'm sure that's not really true, but that's how I remember it, and I suppose it might be relatively true.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
[Antinatalism ] seems to oppose the idea of writing anything at all. To reproduce is to pass on genes. To write is to pass on memes. In that sense, it really is a kind of reproduction, which antinatalism should, theoretically, oppose, or at least which I feel that it opposes emotionally in my own experience.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
She [me muse] feels most at home in autumn, nonetheless, she is glad of the other seasons and loves them all. Without the others she would be unable to feel most at home in autumn, besides which, she almost feels most at home in all of them.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
I suppose what I can say is that I do feel I have a natural spiritual sensibility.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
You focus on the here and now in order to escape existence forever and vanish into Nirvana. There is another religious impulse that is the opposite of this. It uses a world elsewhere in order to affirm life and give a reason to go forth and multiply.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
Another part of the rejection I mention was the realisation that Buddhism quite simply ignores or dismisses a whole hemisphere of human experience that finds expression in and is enshrined by the mystery religions.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
I like the concept of an anti-muse, though I'm not quite sure what that is. If there is such a thing in my life, I suppose it is just this weariness, this sense that it is more fulfilling not to exist, to efface all traces, than to limit oneself to the determined expression of manifestation.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
I think the natural is, for many people, the gateway to something supernatural or otherworldly.
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
I never went to church as a child. I did not .
Quentin S. Crisp
Image
As children in the seventies we were told about nebulous 'strangers'. By definition, we didn't know who these strangers were, and we didn't know what they wanted to do, but only that they were sinister. I think that was the stage the seventies were at.
Quentin S. Crisp