A collections of quotes, plucked from many different sources. Some of these match my own opinions. Some of these go completely against. Some of these aren't even opinions - just dialogues or passages or sentences that stuck out to me. In effect, this is a living scrapbook of amusing compositions of words.

Within the 'symphony of voices,' Kepler believed that the speed of each planet corresponds to certain notes in the Latinate musical scale popular in his day - do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. He claimed that in the harmony of the spheres, the tones of Earth are fa and mi, that the Earth is forever humming fa and mi, and that they stand in a straightforward way for the Latin word for famine.

"With this symphony of voices man can play through the eternity of time in less than an hour, and can taste in small measure the delight of God, the Supreme Artist... I yield freely to the sacred frenzy... the die is cast, and I am writing the book to be read either now or by posterity, it matters not. It can wait a century for a reader, as God Himself has waited 6,000 years for a witness." - Johannes Kepler, Collected Works

- Cosmos, Carl Sagan

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called 'leaves') imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.

Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.

- Cosmos, Carl Sagan

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.

- Cosmos, Carl Sagan

National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.

- Cosmos, Carl Sagan

'I am, alas, a man of leisure,' he said softly. I have made the economies in my time and I have now the means to enjoy the life of idleness.'

'No, no, you would be unwise to do so. I can assure you, it is not so gay as it sounds.' He sighed. 'How true is the saying that man was forced to invent work in order to escape the strain of having to think.'

- Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

- 1984, George Orwell

The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim - for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives - is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus, throughout history, a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again.

- 1984, George Orwell

Observe the rays of the sun in the composition of the rainbow, the colours of which are generated by the falling rain, when each drop in its descent takes every colour of the bow.

- A Treatise on Painting - Leonardo da Vinci

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

-Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

For of course, some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently - though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible.

-Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Actual happiness looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.

-Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its de-politicization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital's drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.

- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

Some of Nietzsche's most prescient pages are those in which he describes the 'oversaturation of an age with history'. 'It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself', he wrote in Untimely Meditations, and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism', in which 'cosmopolitan fingering', a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche's Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.

- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. And sooner or later, that debt is paid.

- Chernobyl, 2019

Elizabeth also wept and was unhappy, but hers also was the misery of innocence, which, like a cloud that passes over the fair moon, for a while hides but cannot tarnish its brightness.

- Mary Shelly, Frankenstein

Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.

- Mary Shelly, Frankenstein

We have come to identify ourselves with the goal, we have become committed to pursue it at all costs rather than admit defeat.

Determined to retain a positive outlook, we remove naysayers from our lives, as the self-help industry instructs us. This may make for a proud slogan for social-media profiles -- a snappy, self-assured 'Ignore the h8ers' -- but it can be a dangerous folly. By removing or ignoring the sources of honest feedback, we create a neat means of fuelling the downward spiral of self-deception.

When we proudly denounce those who would undermine our self-belief, we emulate a model of strength we have been sold principally through the biographies of successful, strong entrepreneurs. We equate persistent commitment and the ability to laugh at one's detractors with a recipe for success. But this is a lie. We believe it because we are told it through many channels, but its source springs from a powerful select few who boast about their life stories as they perceive them.

- Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

It is hard to think about your past without tidying it up into a kind of story: one in which you are cast as the hero or victim.

Invariably we ignore the regular dice-rolls of chance or random luck; successful high-flyers are typically prone to ignoring the interplay of blind fortune when they credit their career trajectories to their canny business sense or brute self-belief. We tell the story we want to tell, and we live out those stories every day.

- Derren Brown, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

It's easy to become as obsessed with online metrics as money. It can then be tempting to use those metrics to decide what to work on next, without taking into account how shallow those metrics really are. An Amazon rank doesn't tell you whether someone read your book twice and loved it so much she passed it on to a friend. Instagram likes don't tell you whether an image you made stuck with someone for a month. A stream count doesn't equal an actual human being showing up to your live show and dancing.

- Austin Kleon, Keep Going

Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb. They want the job title without the work.

If you pick the wrong noun to aspire to, you'll be stuck with the wrong verb, too. When people use the word "creative" as a job title, it not only falsely divides the world into "creatives" and "non-creatives," but also implies that the work of a "creative" is "being creative."

But being creative is never an end; it is a means to something else. Creativity is just a tool.

- Austin Kleon, Keep Going

Dusk, like a palpable entity, entered the room, and the dancing circle of yellow light about the torches etched itself into the ever sharper distinction against the gathering greyness beyond.

- Isaac Asimov, Nightfall

He had long ago decided that no worthwhile woman could ever be seduced; you could present the possibility to them, but you had to leave it to them to do the seducing for you, and if they weren't so minded, there was very little you could do to change their outlook.

- Isaac Asimov, Nightfall

Why had it happened? she asked herself. Why? Why? Why? Were we so evil? Had we strayed so far from the path of the gods that we needed to be punished this way?

No. No! There are no gods; there was no punishment. Of that much, Siferra was still certain. She had no doubt that this was simply the working of blind fate, brought about by the impersonal movements of inaminate and uncaring worlds and suns, drawing together every two thousand years in dispassionate coincidence.

That was all. An accident.

- Isaac Asimov, Nightfall

We think we know what we're doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds - and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.

- Prey, Michael Crichton

He had no right to all the grace and bounty of this world, earned and maintained by the work, the devotion, the faithfulness of its people. Para- dise is for those who make Paradise. He did not belong.

- Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossesed

He went on writing letters to Urras, even when he mailed none of them at all. The fact of writing for someone who might understand - who might have understood - made it possible for him to write, to think.

- Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossesed

You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

- Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossesed

"If you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up, a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death."

- Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossesed

"There's a point, around age twenty," Bedap said. "when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities."

- Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossesed

When they sang, both the exhilaration and the fear became a blind exaltation; his eyes filled with tears. It was deep, in the deep streets, softened by open air and by distances, indistinct, overwhelming, that lifting up of thousands of voices in one song. The singing of the front of the march, far away up the street, and of the endless crowds coming on behind, was put out of phase by the distance the sound must travel, so that the melody seemed always to be lagging and catching up with itself, like a canon, and all the parts of the song where being sung at one time, in the same moment, though each singer sang the tune as a line from beginning to end.

- Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossesed

"But I'm luckier. A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere."

- Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossesed

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

- Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossesed

"Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?"

- Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossesed

"And you will come back," Takver said. Her eyes were very dark, a soft darkness, like the darkness of a forest at night.

- Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossesed

A night-blooming flower from some unimaginable world had opened among the dark leaves and was sending out its perfume with patient, unavailing sweetness to attract some unimaginable moth trillions of miles away, in a garden on a world circling another star. The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness.

- Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossesed

..the fossil record of a few million years ago is replete with a great variety of manlike forms, an interesting number of which are found with holes or fractures in their skulls. Some of these injuries may have been inflicted by leopards or hyenas; but Leakey and the South African anatomist Raymond Dart believed that many of them were inflicted by our ancestors. In Pliocene/Pleistocene times there was almost certainly a vigorous competition among many manlike forms, of which only one line survived-the tool experts, the line that led to us. What role killing played in that competition remains an open question. The gracile Australopithecines were erect, agile, fleet and three and a half feet tall: "little people." I sometimes wonder whether our myths about gnomes, trolls, giants and dwarfs could possibly be a genetic or cultural memory of those times.

- Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden

Even at the time that the Eden story was written, the development of cognitive skills was seen as endowing man with godlike powers and awesome responsibilities. God says: "Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil, and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the Tree of Life, and eat, and live forever" (Genesis 3:22), he must be driven out of the Garden. God places cherubim with a flaming sword east of Eden to guard the Tree of Life from the ambitions of man.

Perhaps the Garden of Eden is not so different from Earth as it appeared to our ancestors of some three or four million years ago, during a legendary golden age when the genus Homo was perfectly interwoven with the other beasts and vegetables. After the exile from Eden we find, in the biblical account, mankind condemned to death; hard work; clothing and modesty as preventatives of sexual stimulation; the dominance of men over women; the domestication of plants (Cain); the domestication of animals (Abel); and murder (Cain plus Abel). These all correspond reasonably well to the historical and archaeological evidence. In the Eden metaphor, there is no evidence of murder before the Fall. But those fractured skulls of bipeds not on the evolutionary line to man may be evidence that our ancestors killed, even in Eden, many manlike animals.

Civilization develops not from Abel, but from Cain the murderer. The very word "civilization" derives from the Latin word for city. It is the leisure time, community organization and specialization of labor in the first cities that permitted the emergence of the arts and technologies we think of as the hallmarks of civilizations. The first city, according to Genesis, was constructed by Cain, the inventor of agriculture - a technology that requires a fixed abode. And it is his descendants, the sons of Lamech, who invent both "artifices in brass and iron" and musical instruments. Metallurgy and music-technology and art - are in the line from Cain. And the passions that lead to murder do not abate: Lamech says, "For I have slain a man for wounding me, and a young man for bruising me; if Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold." The connection between murder and invention has been with us ever since. Both derive from agriculture and civilization.

- Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden

Thus the frontal lobes may be involved with peculiarly human functions in two different ways. If they control anticipation of the future, they must also be the sites of concern, the locales of worry. This is why transection of the frontal lobes reduces anxiety. But prefrontal lobotomy must also greatly reduce the patient's capacity to be human.

The price we pay for anticipation of the future is anxiety about it.

- Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden

In bed, they made love. Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each other's arms, holding love, asleep.

- Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

She eyed him with curiosity. He stood and endured reality.

- Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.

- Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more.

- Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part.

Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.

- Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

Of course, Haber thought, a man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.

- Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

He thought, I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

- Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.*

But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outerspace of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking....

What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?

- Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

How does one hate a country, or love one?

...I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession. Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant. I hope"

- Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Like all the King's House this room was high, red, old, bare, with a musty chill on the air as if the drafts blew in not from other rooms but from other centuries.

- Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

It is curious - but you cannot make a revolution without honest men. The instinct of the populace is infallible. Every revolution has had its honest men. They are soon disposed off afterwards.

- Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary

Youth is a failing only too easily outgrown.

- Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary

Tuppence was ushered into a room on the right of the long passage. A woman was standing by the fire-place. She was no longer in her first youth, and the beauty she undeniably possessed was hardened and coarsened. In her youth, she must have been dazzling. Her pale gold hair, owing a slight assistance to art, was coiled low on her neck, her eyes, of a piercing electric blue, seemed to possess a faculty of boring into the very soul of the person she was looking at.

And yet, despite her swaying grace, and the almost ethereal beauty of her face, you felt instinctively the presence of something hard and menacing, a kind of metallic strength that found expression in the tones of her voice and in that gimlet-like quality of her eyes.

- Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary

Look inwards, for a moment, and consider the contents of your mind. In the course of an ordinary day, you'll think a huge number of different thoughts. You might believe it's Thursday morning, deny that it's too late to catch the train, expect the coffee shop to be open, want the queue to be shorter, wish the guy in front of you would hurry up, hope it's not now too late to catch the train, suspect that the guy in front of you is an idiot, wonder why you thought you had time for coffee when clearly only a fool would risk missing the train and now you'll never make it, what people are going to think about you showing up late, and so on, for the many hurried moments of your conscious life.

Maybe what makes you think about coffee in the first place is another thing in your head, a feeling of tiredness that gets your attention over and above the other bodily sensations you have, all the pains, tickles, twinges and itches and what ever else you might feel. Colouring all this are other things, not quite thoughts or bodily feelings, but emotions like love, anger, regret and happiness. Of course, there's also the passing show, the perceptual experiences you have when your sense organs bump into the world - all the sights, sounds, tastes, touches and smells that come together to immerse you in a three-dimensional picture of everything around you. All the while you remember some things, imagine others, daydream, wonder, plan, and generally get on with your inner life. In doing all this you might notice another something at the centre of it all: you, or at least the sense that you're doing all the thinking and feeling and seeing and everything else.

But what is all this mental reality? It's not just you, but a lot of world - every person and every creature with a point of view. Is a thought another thing like a book or a boat, or is it an entirely different sort of something? How do thoughts fit in to the physical world? Is it right to think of mental things as really real, or is it all somehow reducible to the physical world of particles and forces? Philosophers zero in on all this with two questions. What is a mind? And what is the relationship between mind and body?

- James Garvey, The Story of Philosophy

The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing. Music is a delight because of its rhythm and flow. Yet the moment you arrest the flow and prolong a note or chord beyond its time, the rhythm is destroyed. Because life is likewise a flowing process, change and death are its necessary parts. To work for their exclusion is to work against life.

- Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

For the animal to be happy it is enough that this moment be enjoyable. But man is hardly satisfied with this at all. He is much more concerned to have enjoyable memories and expectations --- especially the latter. With these assured, he can put up with an extremely miserable present. Without this assurance, he can be extremely miserable in the midst of immediate physical pleasure.

- Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings the past and the future are not as real, but more real than the present. The present cannot be lived happily unless the past has been "cleared up" and the future is bright with promise.

- Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money. Money gets rid of the inconveniences of barter. But it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth, because it will do you no good to eat it or wear it for clothing. Money is more or less static, for gold, silver, strong paper, or a bank balance can "stay put" for a long time. But real wealth, such as food, is perishable. Thus a community may possess all the gold in the world, but if it does not farm its crops it will starve.

- Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

It is convention alone which persuades me that I am simply this body bounded by a skin in space, and by birth and death in time.

Where do I begin and end in space? I have relations to the sun and air which are just as vital parts of my existence as my heart. The movement in which I am a pattern or convolution began incalculable ages before the (conventionally isolated) event called birth, and will continue long after the event called death. Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.

- Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

Thus the "brainy" economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic vicious circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse---providing a constant titillation of the ears, eyes, and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect "subject" for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-with-out-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity---shock treatments---as "human interest" shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings. The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire.

- Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

- Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

How long have the planets been circling the sun? Are they getting anywhere, and do they go faster and faster in order to arrive? How often has the spring returned to the earth? Does it come faster and fancier every year, to be sure to be better than last spring, and to hurry on its way to the spring that shall out-spring all springs?

The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music, also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.

- Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people.

In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

- Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow

If everything is judged by how 'useful' it is - useful for staying alive, that is, we are left facing a futile circularity. There must be some added value. At least a part of life should be devoted to living that life, not just working to stop it ending.

- Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow

We have an appetite for wonder, a poetic appetite, which real science ought to be feeding but which is being hijacked, often for monetary gain, by purveyors of superstition, the paranormal and astrology. Resonant phrases like 'the Fourth House of the Age of Aquarius', or 'Neptune went retrograde and moved into Sagittarius' whip up a bogus romance which, to the naïve and impressionable, is almost indistinguishable from authentic scientific poetry.

- Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow

In another Japanese Buddhist fable, two traveling Zen monks were about to wade across a river when a young woman asked them to carry her over the swift water. Both of these monks had taken advanced vows and were not permitted to touch women, but without hesitation the older monk lifted her up, put her on his back, and walked across. When they reached the other side, he let the woman down and, without any small talk, walked away. A few hours later the younger monk blurted out, "Aren't we monks? Why did you carry that woman?"

The older monk replied, "I put her down a long time ago. Why are you still carrying her?"

- Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, What Makes You Not A Budhhist

Most images of the Buddha show him in the posture of sitting meditation, in the particular attitude known as padmasana, the posture of the lotus, with the legs crossed and the feet resting, soles upward, upon the thighs.

Sitting meditation is not, as is often supposed, a spiritual "exercise," a practice followed for some ulterior object. From a Buddhist standpoint, it is simply the proper way to sit, and it seems perfectly natural to remain sitting so long as there is nothing else to be done, and so long as one is not consumed with nervous agitation. To the restless temperament of the West, sitting meditation may seem to be an unpleasant discipline, because we do not seem to be able to sit "just to sit" without qualms of conscience, without feeling that we ought to be doing something more important to justify our existence. To propitiate this restless conscience, sitting meditation must therefore be regarded as an exercise, a discipline with an ulterior motive. Yet at that very point it ceases to be meditation (dhyana) in the Buddhist sense, for where there is purpose, where there is seeking and grasping for results, there is no dhyana.

- Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, What Makes You Not A Budhhist