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Breakfast with Buddha QUOTES

Breakfast with Buddha QUOTES

1 " What difference makes what you believe? What happens will happen anyway, exactly the same, no matter what you believe. What you do makes the important part. What you do. "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

2 " With two teenagers in the house, we sometimes experience a degree of domestic turbulence that sounds, to my ear, like a boiling teakettle filled with hormones shrieking on a stove. "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

3 " You ask a certain question again and again, in a sincere fashion, and the answer appears. But, in my experience, at least, that answer arrives according to it's own mysterious celestial timing, and often in disguise. And it comes in a way you're not prepared for, or don't want, or can't at first, accept. "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

4 " If Christ's message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness. "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

5 " Isn't mockery the province of the insecure? "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

6 " I have a tremendous fascination with the United States of America, the grand, swirling variousness of it, the way it siphons off the ambitious, the poor, and the abused from so many other nations, the ability we seem to have to be noble and heroic at the same time as we are being arrogant and stupid. "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

7 " if Christ’s message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness. "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

8 " Anger is like hands over your eyes when another person is trying to show you. "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

9 " His eyes were more intense, the gaze more intimate. He put just the last inch or so of the fingers of both hands on the table to either side of his plate and said, “Love makes them run. That is not my lineage, my idea. That is a fact just like when water gets cold it ices. Like that. Some people cannot see this is a fact, but this is. They are blind in different ways but this is a fact: Love makes the atoms go where they go and stick where they stick. Everybody when they see a baby, a small boy or girl, they smile? Why? Because inside themself they know this fact. They know love made this baby, this boy, this girl. They feel this natural rising up of love in themself. Okay, yes? Before, I said to you about God’s music that is playing all the time, for everyone. God’s music is this love. And this love that runs our world, sometimes it means that there is help coming from that love, from that . . . source you would "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

10 " There was a small glass vase between us, three gladioli in a few ounces of water. One of the gladioli had dropped a petal- brushstroke of purple on fine white cloth. Rinpoche drank the last sip of his tea, then set the cup aside, took the petal with his thumb and second finger, placed it on the middle of the saucer in front of him, and turned the cup upside down to cover it.
"I feel a lesson coming on," I said...
"The flower is the good inside every person," he said. "The cup is like a wall, to protect. Many people have that wall."
"Armor" I said. He nodded.
"Why?"
"Because to live without the cup means you must feel the world as the world really is. "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

11 " The frown again. So much contained there in the flex of a few muscles. All of history, it sometimes seemed to me. All of ours, at least. "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

12 " I thought I heard a cow mooing in Seese's back yard. Later on, later down the road, as they say, I would learn that this was the sound of the Rinpoche chanting some ancient prayer. But, at that moment, it sounded to me very much like a mooing cow. "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

13 " When you are a crank, you put yourself on the top of the list of people you make miserable. "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

14 " Inside the big world that you cannot control, you have the small world of you that you can control. In that small world, if you look, you can see whether to go this way toward good, or the other way toward bad. "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

15 " All that we are is the result of what we have thought: It is built on our thoughts, it is made from our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with evil thought, pain follows him, just like the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the cart. If a person speaks or acts with pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves... "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

16 " our national obsession with sex (and if you don’t think there is a national obsession with sex, just browse the magazine racks in the local chain bookstore) is really nothing more than a profound spiritual longing in disguise: the desire to exhaust all other desires and feel loved and sated, at peace with our fragmented modern selves, linked to those around us. At peace, at rest. I wonder, sometimes, if the same deep desire lies at the heart of addiction to drugs, to drink, to eating, to work: are we all just desperately looking for some strategy that will get us past the shoals of modern existence and safely into that imagined, calm port? "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

17 " When you have known someone your whole life you don’t need a lot of warm-up time to get into a big argument. All the fore-play has been done years ago, and so the battle sits in your memory like stove gas awaiting the match. A wrong word, a careless allusion, and the old fire is suddenly raging. "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

18 " A fair portion of my anger had returned, but alongside it ran the memory of those few seconds on the yoga mat in the death pose. I felt as if I had been shown a kind of essential secret, something so subtle and quiet and small(and yet so important)that I could gone my entire adult life and never even imagined such a thing existed. "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

19 " it occurred to me that the modern spiritual leaders of my tradition were always somber, self-important men, thickly coated in others’ idea of who they were supposed to be. "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha

20 " What difference makes what you believe? What happens will happen anyway, exactly the same, no matter what you believe. What you do makes the important part. What you do "

― Roland Merullo , Breakfast with Buddha