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Everyone has the same life purpose, which is the quest of happiness for oneself and for others.
Robert Thurman
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Robert Thurman
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: August 4
Curator
Exhibition Curator
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Robert Alexander Farrar Thurman
Oneself
Purpose
Happiness
Everyone
Others
Life
Quests
Quest
More quotes by Robert Thurman
The most important enemy for everyone is their own illusion that makes them unrealistic or exaggerates their sense of self-importance in the world. Ironically, you're the super secret enemy. Whether lay or householder, everyone has that internal enemy.
Robert Thurman
What makes me fully alive is anything. Really just being alive is enough.
Robert Thurman
The Chinese people absolutely need good spiritual examples. They also could use a citizen of their own, who is free and happy, and pleased with them, and represents them in a positive way to the world. Especially now that they're becoming this mega-power, and no longer known as a puppet in the game, or strictly business people.
Robert Thurman
When all is lost, when all is let go of, when all is abandoned what you are left with is an ocean of bliss. What you emerged with what you are is an ocean of bliss. Your cells and atoms and brain and bones and blood stream all of it is bliss.
Robert Thurman
The understanding of it [absolute] is very important as a beginning point. Then you can use meditation, further reasoning, long-term familiarity etc., you can use all kinds of methods to deepen this understanding and to have it counter the instinctual sense of being an absolute you.
Robert Thurman
You could then use the dream to learn more about yourself, others, the world, and the nature of life. You can come awake in the matrix and realize you're the one in your own dream. People on the spiritual path can do that, thus they can avoid wasting the whole night, and use it in a developmental, nice way.
Robert Thurman
This question, Is loving your enemy a life practice?, I like that question. It is a life practice, certainly, for everyone. It relates to the idea of, Is this a householder practice or is it a monk practice? I think it's both. Everyone has that practice.
Robert Thurman
Greed, the desire to incorporate, is magnified and fed back to produce the pretan realms, just as hate creates the hells.
Robert Thurman
Take the example of people who are being most unrealistic - people who are beating monks to death and torturing them. Why shouldn't you be angry or hate that person? Well, the person who is doing that is very unhappy. They are being ordered by a higher-up.
Robert Thurman
They [Chinese] will need a sympathetic intercessor with other people in the world to avoid conflict and create trust, and of course, Dalai Lama would be ideal. In another ten years from now though, he won't have the time to be really effective for them. They're truly wasting their time not using him now.
Robert Thurman
You should never be ashamed of the suffering you've been through.
Robert Thurman
Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the greatest teachers of our time. He reaches from the heights of insight down to the deepest places of the absolutely ordinary.
Robert Thurman
Imagine a culture in which everything is geared toward helping all individuals become the best human beings they can be in which individuals are driven to devoting their lives to becoming enlightened by the natural flood of compassion for others that arises from their wisdom.
Robert Thurman
I think about the trends at the moment in the planet and how it looks for my grandchildren. I don't panic over it, even though rationally maybe I should. I have faith that these terrible trends will change, and they will not go to their logical conclusions of climate change, militarism, pollution, overpopulation.
Robert Thurman
First of all, no self doesn't mean there is no self, haha. So the no problem is jumped at a little too fast I'm afraid. Especially in American culture where people tend to be materialistic philosophically. I don't mean running to the mall, but philosophically, you see?
Robert Thurman
Buddhism is all about science. If science is the systematic pursuit of the accurate knowledge of reality, then science is Buddhism, Buddhism is science.
Robert Thurman
You take up energy towards someone because you think loving your enemy doesn't just mean caving into your enemy. It means first of all liberating yourself.
Robert Thurman
Hate poisons your life.
Robert Thurman
You have to be responsible for yourself, refer to yourself, develop yourself, help others, whatever it may be. So we shouldn't have an idea that the whole thing is to shatter ones ego.
Robert Thurman
Struggling with the world and having the problem of you vs. the world is a really big problem. You're going to lose because the world is so much bigger than you, and longer lasting.
Robert Thurman
