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1 " Patience is a natural consequence of the cultivation of compassion & love, for ourselves and all beings. "
― Allan Lokos , Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living
2 " For a considerable portion of humanity today, it is possible and indeed likely that one's neighbor, one's colleague, or one's employer will have a different mother tongue, eat different food, and follow a different religion than oneself. It is a matter of great urgency, therefore, that we find ways to cooperate with one another in a spirit of mutual acceptance and respect.In such a world, I feel, it is vital for us to find genuinely sustainable and universal approach to ethics, inner values, and personal integrity-an approach that can transcend religious, cultural, and racial differences and appeal to people at a sustainable, universal approach is what I call the project of secular ethics.All religions, therefore, to some extent, ground the cultivation of inner values and ethical awareness in some kind of metaphysical (that is, not empirically demonstrable) understanding of the world and of life after death. And just as the doctrine of divine judgment underlies ethical teachings in many theistic religions, so too does the doctrine of karma and future lives in non-theistic religions.As I see it, spirituality has two dimensions. The first dimension, that of basic spiritual well-being-by which I mean inner mental and emotional strength and balance-does not depend on religion but comes from our innate human nature as beings with a natural disposition toward compassion, kindness, and caring for others. The second dimension is what may be considered religion-based spirituality, which is acquired from our upbringing and culture and is tied to particular beliefs and practices. The difference between the two is something like the difference between water and tea.On this understanding, ethics consists less of rules to be obeyed than of principles for inner self-regulation to promote those aspects of our nature which we recognize as conducive to our own well-being and that of others.It is by moving beyond narrow self-interest that we find meaning, purpose, and satisfaction in life. "
― Dalai Lama XIV , Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World
3 " A good roast of sun, it slows you, lets you relax–and out here if there's anything wrong, you can see it coming with bags of time to do what's next. This is the place and the weather for peace, for the cultivation of a friendly mind. "
― A.L. Kennedy , Day
4 " You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom. "
― Jon Kabat-Zinn , Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
5 " Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important. "
― James Baldwin , Notes of a Native Son
6 " Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected. "
― George MacDonald ,
7 " The art of tea, whichever way you drink it, or whichever country you are from, has one underlining thread for all of us. It is the cultivation of yourself as you follow the ceremony of preparing your tea, the way in which you make your tea, how and where you drink it, and with whom. Making a cup of tea creates a space for just being. "
― Nicola Salter
8 " Life changes as seasons change. And with each season, we, like the farmer, have a job to do in the cultivation of our Don't Die® spirit. "
9 " These ideas fit the experience of these Japanese women who often talked about searching for or trying to develop " self" (jibun). Cultivating or polishing self by doing tea ceremony or being a good mother, for example, had a good connotation for the Japanese because it meant that you were trying to go beyond your narrow self and connect self with the larger world beyond social norms. But developing self in the new way these women used it meant to develop self according to just what you want to do or in a way that enhances your own possibilities in the world. Would others see choosing a life for self as selfish? These women had to maintain some ambiguity because they were wandering into dangerous territory when they wanted to travel just to enjoy themselves, or keep working and not marry. In a society that honored the cultivation of a larger self, would they themselves someday suffer for having chosen the self-centered way? "
10 " As a society of unbelief, Western culture is devoid of a sense of journey, of adventure, because it lacks belief in much more than the cultivation of an ever-shrinking horizon of self-preservation and and self-expression. "
― Stanley Hauerwas , Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony
11 " In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane. "
12 " It is a simple but sometimes forgotten truth that the greatest enemy to present joy and high hopes is the cultivation of retrospective bitterness. "
― Robert Menzies
13 " It is only in virtue that you can discover, that you can live - not in the cultivation of a virtue, which merely brings about respectability, not understanding and freedom. "
― J. Krishnamurti
14 " Believing, as they now did, that the heavenly powers took part in human affairs, they became so much absorbed in the cultivation of religion and so deeply imbued with the sense of their religious duties, that the sanctity of an oath had more power to control their lives than the fear of punishment for lawbreaking. "
― Livy , The History of Rome, Books 1-5: The Early History of Rome
15 " In the midst of a culture that is rationally organized for a vocational workaday life, there is hardly any room for the cultivation of acosmic brotherliness, unless it is among strata who are economically carefree. Under the technical and social conditions of rational culture, an imitation of the life of Buddha, Jesus, or Francis seems condemned to failure for purely external reasons. "
― Max Weber ,
16 " Capital is necessary to the cultivation of esthetic value. "
― Harold Bloom , The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
17 " Mentoring is the cultivation of young adults, the tender caring for and nurturing of them so that they will grow, flourish, and be fruitful. "
18 " The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings. "
― Masanobu Fukuoka , The One-Straw Revolution
19 " When it is understood that one loses joy and happiness in the attempt to possess them, the essence of natural farming will be realized. The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings. "
20 " Some Southerners effectively applied slave labor to the cultivation of corn, grain, and hemp (for making rope and twine), to mining and lumbering, to building canals and railroads, and even to the manufacture of textiles, iron, and other industrial products. Nevertheless, no other American region contained so many white farmers who merely subsisted on their own produce. The “typical” white Southerner was not a slaveholding planter but a small farmer who tried, often without success, to achieve both relative self-sufficiency and a steady income from marketable cash crops. "
― David Brion Davis , Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World