Nanamoli Thera Quotes & Sayings

A thought for this Damocletian Age: the trouble with justice is it just isn't it? — Nanamoli Thera

Ignorance screens the truth. It is on that screen that people paint pictures and write underneath their labels "god" and "not-god" and "theism.' and "atheism" . — Nanamoli Thera

Where would I be (and what would happen to me), if I could see all round me and above and below at once ? — Nanamoli Thera

Odd how people interested in religion spend so much time trying to convert the obvious meaning of their texts that are their authority. — Nanamoli Thera

I have always felt doubtful about those people who try to get one to give up one's own bunkum and accept their debunkum instead. — Nanamoli Thera

Unambiguous is nonexistent. — Nanamoli Thera

Absolute Truth would be incompatible with life as absolute light would be with vision — Nanamoli Thera

If you are not master of the facts they will beat you down with opinions. If you are not master of the void they will beat you down with facts. — Nanamoli Thera

The concept of nutriment depends (a) upon association and (a) upon impermanence and (c) upon hunger. Hunger, seeking for satisfaction, devours x, which is associated with y that gives it satisfaction; but the satisfaction given is impermanent and thereby renews the hunger. "I" hungering for satisfaction, devour (x) food (eye object, taste, smell, touch object), the contact of which is associated with (y) pleasant feeling that gives satisfaction; but the satisfaction given by pleasant feeling is impermanent and by changing renews the pain of hunger. — Nanamoli Thera

Much of what is asserted as true is so asserted, not as a declaration of what the speaker knows but rather as a defence against doubt in the hope that the opposite proposition may be thereby excluded. — Nanamoli Thera

To be is to be contingent: nothing of which it can be said that "it is" can be alone and independent. But being is a member of paticca-samuppada as arising which contains ignorance. Being is only invertible by ignorance.

Destruction of ignorance destroys the illusion of being. When ignorance is no more, than consciousness no longer can attribute being (pahoti) at all. But that is not all for when consciousness is predicated of one who has no ignorance than it is no more indicatable (as it was indicated in M Sutta 22). — Nanamoli Thera

From the 18th to the 20th Century it was the boast that human thought had at least come out of the dark woods of medieval superstition, credulity and obscurantism, into the sunshine of clear thinking where the dry breezes of skepticism blow unhindered. 'Fell the trees and level the hills that still obscure the view; let the winds drive off the mist' - they said. But now that much of this work has been accomplished it is beginning to be felt that there is no shade in all these flat plains of perpetual parching wind and sunshine, and through this desert no flooding Nile flows. There are those who, secretly, would like, if they could, to reconstruct the dim, wet, haunted woods before they die of thirst. — Nanamoli Thera

Civilisation is the art of living in contact with other persons with the minimum of discomfort. — Nanamoli Thera

How does the body come to be apprehended as a body? Why does it not fall apart into the seen and the heard, the smelt, the tasted and the touched? — Nanamoli Thera

Certainty is absence of infinity, infinity is presence of uncertainty. — Nanamoli Thera

There are two ways of attempting to deal with the appalling difficulties of choice on the higher ethical levels (Truth/beauty/goodness; family/country, war/peace, principles/persons.. ): (1) one can attempt to justify a one-sided choice, and this is what philosophies of value and religions attempt to do through reason and faith (feeling,) respectively. But this always founders or is never safe from foundering. (2) Or the dialectic can be squarely faced in the fact that no one-sided solution of it is ever justifiable by reason or by faith. And here enters the question not of acceptance or refusal, nor of affirmation or denial, but of letting-go. The letting-go, however, is limited, in life at least (and without taking death into account) by the boundary of ability to let go. — Nanamoli Thera

All the questions asked about death are wrongly put. — Nanamoli Thera

In a syllogism (1. All men are mortal, 2. Socrates is a man, 3. Therefore Socrates is mortal), the generalization (all men are mortal) must have been arrived at by induction. No inductive process is ever absolutely certain. There is always the leap, the assumption, of generalizing and therefore one of the premises of a syllogism must have an element of uncertainty. So it cannot prove anything with certainty.

A syllogism is therefore a signpost pointing where to look for direct experience, but can inherently never give information that is 100% certain. But a syllogism (on metaphysical subjects) can also point to what can, inherently, never be experienced; then it is an anomaly. — Nanamoli Thera

Wandering in deserted places there are found many traces and tracks from which we deduce the movements of heroes and gods and so we w
eave history. Yet were our vision to become a little clearer we might discover that all these tracks are merely made by ourselves during our own earlier wanderings. — Nanamoli Thera

Wandering across a city - walking often quite alone, down dark alleys, through unfrequented districts and debouching suddenly onto main thoroughfares where for a spell one follows the main stream, is adopted by a group "he has come where we come from, wants to go where we want to go". For a while it is true but the side streets are there. Pause in one of them for a moment, and the stream has moved on. So, as there is no catching up with the group, there is no more reason to return to the main street than to wander away from it... more alleys... more thoroughfares... Where shall we be sleeping tonight? And those odd encounters of eyes in lonely alleys... — Nanamoli Thera

I was the future and shall be the past - I am a timeless, everlasting Now, so short I have no end, so long I have no duration. — Nanamoli Thera

So long as one assumes death as an absolute fact, one must have, as an assumed absolute value based on it, the decision either to kill or to be killed in the last extreme (and this includes attitudes to suicide and to 'natural death'). This alternative ultimately divides all people (who make that assumption about death) into two types. With a proper understanding of death, the decision (dialectic) must collapse on the laying bare of the assumption. Freud has remarked, that death is inconceivable to the Unconscious, a statement which, though open to the usual criticisms of F's mechanistic assumptions about consciousness, does point to a very important factual dialectic in assumptions about death. — Nanamoli Thera

Authoritative people bore me: but what bores me even more are those swarms of little people who love authority and in virtue of whom the authority of the authoritative can be exercised. — Nanamoli Thera

What the scientists are apt to forget: the difference between quantity and quality is one of quality, not of -quantity. — Nanamoli Thera

What we are not at all interested in may be what we are. — Nanamoli Thera

The basic Irrational Act which is renewed every moment of life, is not to commit suicide. — Nanamoli Thera

Forgetting is a very useful kind of ignorance: it wipes the bad sums off our slates. — Nanamoli Thera

It is no ipso facto escape from dogma to assert (knowingly or not) non-dogmatism dogmatically.
It is no ipso facto escape from credulity to believe in one's own scepticism. — Nanamoli Thera

One of the most remarkable facts of this age is the negligible direct personal power which scientists have in the control of the world's affairs. The marvelous means they so successfully produce are always used by non-scientists against whom the scientists themselves seem to be powerless and even purposeless. What clever sheep they are. — Nanamoli Thera

The five senses offer us five different ways of shutting out reality. What is intuition and what does it perceive? — Nanamoli Thera

Just as one can arrange bits of iron, etc, into a hermetically sealed box which imprison other pieces of matter, so one can arrange thoughts into a box too, which effectively imprisons other thoughts. — Nanamoli Thera

Interpretative thoughts settle on a bare sensory perception like a swarm of blue-bottles on an open wound. — Nanamoli Thera

It is in the company of others that one can be really lonely, for then one's personality is forced openly to try to express what it's separate individuality is. — Nanamoli Thera

How is it I have the strength to carry my own weaknesses? — Nanamoli Thera

Don't build yourself an ivory tower" the moralists say. But I am an ivory tower by the mere fact that I am. On the crude physical level the body is a frame of (ivory) bones on which the muscles are stretched, crowned by an (ivory) bone pill-box turret housing the brain - shielding it from the blows of 'reality' so that it can get on with its absurd work undisturbed. On the non-physical level my I-ness is an ivory tower of orderly individual views and vistas shielding 'me' from being swallowed up in chaos. Dear moralists: don't they see that life is a constant flight up and down the endless steps of the dark ivory tower seeking to escape from the horrid chaos of real freedom? — Nanamoli Thera

It is our eyes that blind us and our ears that deafen us. — Nanamoli Thera

As electricity is made up of positive and negative current - so is human life a system of attraction and repulsion. - Turn off the current if you want quiet. - Yes, but where is the switch? — Nanamoli Thera

When we are young the noise of general conversation seems much the most fun. When we grow up we discover the possibilities of the tete-a-tete. In maturity the monologue habit sets is. But now at last there is the chance to investigate the rich depth of the silence when the monologue is suspended. — Nanamoli Thera

Sati - sampajanna ("Mindfulness and clear comprehension") should be examined carefully from the point of view of the centipede who could not walk when she thought about how she moved her limbs. And also from the point of view of absorption in, say artistic creation and detached observation of it. Absorption in piano playing or painting seems to be "successful" but detached observation or enjoyment of "my playing" or "my painting" seems to have the centipede effect. What are the facts here and what is the lesson to be drawn? — Nanamoli Thera

Two demons: one who insists that what is to be inferred by verbal processes must correspond to experience; and one who 'insists that what cannot be arrived at by verbal processes cannot correspond to experience. — Nanamoli Thera