Top 44 Stephen Batchelor Quotes
#1. Erotic names, robes, insignia of office, titles- the trappings of religion- confuse as much as they help.
Stephen Batchelor
#2. There is nothing one can have that one cannot fear to lose. Instead of living life in order to have more abundantly, live life in order to be more abundantly.
Stephen Batchelor
#3. Living from our deepest understanding requires an enormous effort, especially when it goes against the stream of our instinctually programmed perceptions of the world.
Stephen Batchelor
#4. It has taken four billion years of evolution to generate this kind of organism with this kind of brain, and yet we wake up in the morning and feel bored.
Stephen Batchelor
#6. The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo makes a similar point to Rorty: "We don't reach agreement when we have discovered the truth," he observes; "we say we have discovered the truth when we reach agreement.
Stephen Batchelor
#7. To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love. (157)
Stephen Batchelor
#8. Learning and education have frequently degenerated into the systematic accumulation of facts and information.
Stephen Batchelor
#9. Ironically, the more we crave to possess and dominate the world and others, the deeper and more unbearable becomes the chasm of our own emptiness.
Stephen Batchelor
#10. Exotic names, robes, insignia of office, titles - the trappings of religion - confuse as much as they help. They endorse the assumption of the existence of an elite whose explicit commitment grants them implicit extraordinariness.
Stephen Batchelor
#11. Loneliness is not only positively characterized by a certain degree of isolation, but is negatively characterized by a deficiency of participation.
Stephen Batchelor
#12. Inner spiritual transformation is just as dependent upon the effect of our economic life upon the world as transformations in the world are dependent upon spiritual re-orientation.
Stephen Batchelor
#13. Buddhism, I think, is probably facing the single most difficult transition from one historical epoch to another, which is really the transition to modernity.
Stephen Batchelor
#14. Yet Gotama's Dhamma is more than just a series of axioms. It is to be lived rather than simply adopted and believed in. It entails that one embrace this world in all its contingency and specificity, with all its ambiguity and flaws.
Stephen Batchelor
#15. Habitually, as we anxiously flee from the responsibility of our existence as a whole, we place our hope in the particular objects and situations of the world. This, however, fails to provide us with a secure refuge and our initial anxiety asserts itself again.
Stephen Batchelor
#16. As for the law of moral causation ('karma'): this is human justice dressed up as cosmic justice and then imputed to the impersonal workings of the natural world.
Stephen Batchelor
#17. Our conceptions of the world affect our perceptions of the world which, in turn, condition the way we subsequently conceive the world.
Stephen Batchelor
#18. In varying degrees, the authority of the dharma was replaced by the authority of the guru, who came, in some traditions, to assume the role of the Buddha himself.
Stephen Batchelor
#19. While 'Buddhism' suggests another belief system, 'dharma practice' suggests a course of action. The four ennobling truths are not propositions to believe; they are challenges to act.
Stephen Batchelor
#21. In pride we consciously elevate our own standing and concerns and look down upon others as essentially inferior.
Stephen Batchelor
#22. An agnostic Buddhist would not regard the Dharma as a source of answers to questions of where we came from, where we are going, what happens after death. He would seek such knowledge in the appropriate domains: astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc.
Stephen Batchelor
#23. Consciousness is an emergent, contingent, and impermanent phenomenon. It has no magical capacity to break free from the field of events out of which it springs.
Stephen Batchelor
#24. P. 62 ... meditation ... exposes a contradiction between the sort of person we wish to be and the kind of person we are. Restlessness and lethargy are ways of evading the discomfort of this contradiction.
Stephen Batchelor
#25. Buddhism, it seemed, was a rational religion, whose truth-claims could withstand the test of reason.
Stephen Batchelor
#26. What lies ahead is revealed to us through our being confronted with possibilities. Our possibilities, however, are not unconditional and infinite but are limited by the structure of our actual existence.
Stephen Batchelor
#27. A compassionate heart still feels anger, greed, jealousy, and other such emotions. But it accepts them for what they are with equanimity, and cultivates the strength of mind to let them arise and pass without identifying with or acting upon them.
Stephen Batchelor
#28. The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities, and risks. (65)
Stephen Batchelor
#29. To embrace the contingency of one's life is to embrace one's fate as an ephemeral but sentient being. As Nietzsche claimed, one can come to love that fate. But to do so one must first embrace it, though one instinctively recoils at such a prospect.
Stephen Batchelor
#31. What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)
Stephen Batchelor
#33. Of the monastic institutions on which it depended. Since celibate monks tended to
Stephen Batchelor
#34. Not only are we inescapably alone in the realms of our private thoughts, perceptions and feelings, but we are also, paradoxically, inescapably together in a world with others.
Stephen Batchelor
#35. To preserve the integrity of the tradition, we have to distinguish between what is central to that integrity and what is peripheral. We have to discern between what elements are vital for the survival of dharma practice and what are alien cultural artefacts that might obstruct that survival.
Stephen Batchelor
#36. We should not allow ourselves to be deceived by our outward show of 'civilized' manners and 'cultured' social behavior into believing that self-concern, desirous attachment, aversion, and indifference are steadily losing their hold over us.
Stephen Batchelor
#37. This body is fragile. It is just flesh. Listen to the heartbeat. Life depends on the pumping of a muscle.
Stephen Batchelor
#38. As a way of life, a middle path is an ongoing task of responsiveness and risk, grounded on a groundless ground. Its twists and turns are as turbulent and unpredictable as life itself.
Stephen Batchelor
#39. In taking the everyday details of life for granted, we fail to appreciate the extraordinary fact that we are conscious at all.
Stephen Batchelor
#40. [Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130)
Stephen Batchelor
#41. Man's mastery over nature, then, is a mastery which has less and less control over itself ... A world where techniques are paramount is a world given over to desire and fear; because every technique is there to serve some desire or fear.2 - Gabriel Marcel
Stephen Batchelor
#42. The origin of the conflict, frustration, and anxiety we experience does not lie in the nature of the world itself but in our distorted conceptions of the world.
Stephen Batchelor
#43. You only set out to prove what you have already decided to believe.
Stephen Batchelor
#44. Each time the dharma moved into a different civilization or historical period, it faced a twofold challenge: to maintain its integrity as an internally coherent tradition, and to express its vision in a way that responded to the needs of the new situation.
Stephen Batchelor
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