“This, as Joseph had pointed out on retreat, is the lie we tell ourselves our whole lives: as soon as we get the next meal, party, vacation, sexual encounter, as soon as we get married, get a promotion, get to the airport check-in, get through security and consume a bouquet of Auntie Anne’s Cinnamon Sugar Stix, we’ll feel really good. But as soon as we find ourselves in the airport gate area, having ingested 470 calories’ worth of sugar and fat before dinner, we don’t bother to examine the lie that fuels our lives. We tell ourselves we’ll sleep it off, take a run, eat a healthy breakfast, and then, finally, everything will be complete. We live so much of our lives pushed forward by these “if only” thoughts, and yet the itch remains. The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness.””

10% Happier

“Christians like yourself invariably declare that monsters like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Kim Il Sung spring from the womb of atheism. ... The problem with such tyrants is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they embrace other life-destroying myths. Most become the center of a quasi-religious personality cult, requiring the continual use of propaganda for its maintenance. There is a difference between propaganda and the honest dissemination of information that we (generally) expect from a liberal democracy. ...Consider the Holocaust: the anti-Semitism that built the Nazi death camps was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominately secular way, its roots were religious, and the explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued throughout the period. The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914. And both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with the Nazi genocide.Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of political and racial dogmatism. It is time that Christians like yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. One need not accept anything on insufficient evidence to find the virgin birth of Jesus to be a preposterous idea. The problem with religion”

Letter to a Christian Nation

“I was once at an event where my friend and meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein was asked if he believed we have free will. He answered the question with arresting clarity when he said that he couldn’t even figure out what the term could possibly mean. What does it mean to have a will that is free from the cause-and-effect relationships of the universe? As he gestured with his hands dancing above him in the air, trying to point to this imaginary free will, he asked, “How can we even try to picture such a will floating about?””

Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind

“My friend Joseph Goldstein, one of the finest vipassana teachers I know, likens this shift in awareness to the experience of being fully immersed in a film and then suddenly realizing that you are sitting in a theater watching a mere play of light on a wall.””

Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

“My grandfather used to like the word 'mitigate,'" Harry said. "He liked the sound of it, and he used it whenever he could. When he was a very old man, he often got on the subject of dying. 'You cant talk your way out,' he'd often say, 'and you can't buy your way out, and you can't shoot your way out, and the only thing that mitigates the matter in the slightest is the fact that nobody else is going to escape. Nobody-no, not one.'""I know, I know," said Mr. Hewitt, "but what's the purpose of it?""You supported your wife, didn't you?" asked Harry. "You raised a family, didn't you? That's the purpose of it."'That's no purpose," said Mr. Hewitt. "The same thing that's going to happen to me is going to happen to them.""The generations have to keep coming along," said Harry. "That's all I know.""You're put here, " said Mr. Hewitt, "and you're allowed to eat and draw breath and go back and forth a few short years, and about the time you get things in shape where you can sit down and enjoy them you wind up in a box in a hole in the ground, and as far as I can see, there's no purpose to it whatsoever.””

Up in the Old Hotel

“heard the nature of the Fourth Dimension”

Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad

“It was simply the way with Harry, like waiting for sunrise. But once you made clear that you wouldn't be going to bed with him, he'd look oddly relieved and calm down. And the matter once raised would not be revisited, I will say that for him. He didn't make a nuisance of himself. Funny old skellum. Never dull. There are men whom it is important not to take the slightest notice of when they're talking, if it's after ten o'clock at night and they've had a glass of beer. Harry was one such mammal.They really and truly don't mean to be idiots. But it's like a Roman Catholic person not wanting to feel guilt. Might as well ask water to run uphill. Except that conceivably be contrived. With a pump.Once, he asked my sister to run away with him, to Rotterdam I think it was. She said no and he asked my brother. That was the most important thing to understand about Harry. Essentially, what he wanted--darling, who wouldn't--was someone to run away with him to Rotterdam.It's what all of us want, isn't it? Of course, nobody gets it. Probably not even those misfortunates who are in Rotterdam already. One wonders where want to run away to. Crouch End?””

Shadowplay

“Another grave fault in our election system is that the campaigns are unduly strung out. [Election Administration in the United States, 1934, page 72]””

“Of course, there can be clear indications that a teacher is not worth paying attention to. A history as a fabulist or a con artist should be considered fatal; thus, the spiritual opinions of Joseph Smith, Gurdjieff, and L. Ron Hubbard can be safely ignored. A fetish for numbers is also an ominous sign. Math is magical, but math approached like magic is just superstition”

Waking Up: Searching for Spirituality Without Religion

“On meditation Real Happiness, Sharon Salzberg Insight Meditation, Joseph Goldstein On Buddhism and mindfulness in general Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, Dr. Mark Epstein Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor””

10% Happier

“His name wasn’t really Jaywalker, of course. Once it had been Harrison J. Walker. But he hated Harrison, which had struck him as overly pretentious and WASPy, for as long as he could remember being aware of such things. And he hated Harry even more, associating it with a bald head, a potbelly and the stub of a day-old cigar. So, long ago, he’d taken to calling himself Jay Walker, and somewhere along the line someone had blurred that into Jaywalker. Which had been all right with him; the truth was, he’d never had the patience to stand on a curb waiting for a light without a pair of eyes of its own to tell him whether it was safe to cross or not, or the discipline to walk from midblock to corner to midblock again, all in order to end up directly across from where he’d started out in the first place. He answered his office phone (his soon-to-be former office phone) “Jaywalker,” responded unthinkingly to “Mr. Jaywalker,” and when asked on some form or other to supply a surname or a given name (for the life of him, he’d never been able to figure out which was which), he simply wrote “Jaywalker” in both blanks, resulting in a small but not insignificant portion of his mail arriving addressed to “Mr. Jaywalker Jaywalker.” It was sort of like being Major Major, he decided, or Woolly Woolly. Names, he’d come to believe, were vastly overrated.””

The Tenth Case

Quotes by Joseph Harris