Fritz Eichenberg
Hatred may be one of the most destructive emotions but not for the conventional reasons, that it provokes aggression and violence. The main harm it may cause could be how easily it lets us turn responsibility away from ourselves. When this happens, it prevents any realistic solution to the underlying problem. And when we take action on the basis of projecting all responsibility externally, the inevitable result become the creation of more harm, for ourselves and others.
“As surely as bandits hate their chief so do the people of a country resent whatever is over them… (the wise) knowing that a kingdom cannot be mounted get under it; knowing that the people cannot be led he keeps behind them.”
“Who dares think one thing, and another tell, my heart detests him as the gates of hell.”
“Victory breeds hatred. The defeated live in pain. Happily the peaceful live giving up victory and defeat.”
“To stand from Fear set free, to breathe and wait; to hold a hand uplifted over Hate; what else is Wisdom?”
“If you kill such a one as I am, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me... the evil of unjustly taking away the life of another is far greater.”
“As iron is eaten away by rust, so the envious are consumed by their own passion.”
“The man of spirit hates to see people gather around him. He avoids the crowd… There is nothing to be gained from the support of a lot of half-wits who are doomed to end up in a fight with each other.”
“Violence and injury enclose in their net all that do such things, and generally return upon him who began.”
“If your mind wanders away, do not follow it. A mind disturbed by love and aversion is deluded; a mind free from delusion and reality alike is real, the Buddha-Mind.”
“When right and wrong, other and self exist in their midst, love and hate will arise and attach each other. When love and hate arise and attack each other, warfare will flourish.”
“Among ten people, three seek life because they hate death, three seek death because they hate life, and three live as if they were dead.”
“Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads to violence. This is the equation.”
“We should put our trust in nothing at all. It is because foolish people are deeply trustful that they know hatred and anger... If you put trust in neither yourself or others, you will rejoice when good comes, and when evil comes you will not grieve.”
“Although you may have fortresses, they will not save you if you are hated by the people.”
“Make use of your enemies… The wise will turn ill will into a mirror more faithful than that of kindness”
“You think that good means hating what is bad. What's bad is the hating mind itself”
“The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves.”
“Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.”
“Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control.”
“Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.”
“what trances of torments does the man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.”
“He had begun... to sink into the hideous fettering of domestic hate... to have an alarmed foresight of her irrevocable loss of love for him and the consequent dreariness of their life.”
“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”
“This is a busy world, and no one has time to sit right down and hate you. The only enemies we have are those we conjure up ourselves. The idea that we have enemies is only egotism gone to seed.”
“The modern mind is never popular in its own day. People hate being made to think... All things are at odds when God sets a thinker loose on the planet.”
“We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to hate when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools.”
“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
“It is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.”
“that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed… and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriots – how passionately I hate them!... this bogey would have disappeared long ago had the sound sense of the peoples not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests.”
“It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak a different vernacular, so to speak.”
“I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed... I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”
“Never in my life had I felt so tangibly and with such astonishment that hate, by passing successively through comprehension, mercy, and sympathy, can be transformed into love. The same can happen when good wrestles with evil”
“The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”
“They don’t ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise. (June 1960)”
“Taoism and Buddhism pursue the same aims... The highest goal of Taoism as well as Buddhism is a state of enlightenment which the Buddha defines as the overcoming of greed, hatred, and ignorance—not stupidity but the ignoring of facts which appear uncomfortable or against our desires.”
“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current”
“In love there should be hate, or non-attachment. And in hate there should be love, or acceptance. Love and hate are one thing. We should accept weeds, despite how we feel about them.”
“Nor from the Dalai Lama himself will you ever hear a word of resentment or condemnation. These men have been the victims of a terrific upheaval, of terrible violence, and yet they have no hatred. I have learned what religion is from these men. Here is true religion, alive—today.”
“Patience means holding back your inclination to the seven emotions: hate, adoration, joy, anxiety, anger, grief, fear. If you don't give way to the seven, you're patient, then you'll soon understand all manner of things and be in harmony with Eternity.”
“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.”
“He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it?”
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
“Going beyond challenge is learning the art of war… when you do not produce another force of hatred, the opposing force collapses,”
“Hatred is like a long, dark shadow. Not even the person it falls upon knows where it comes from. It is like a two-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself… Once it has taken root in your heart, hatred is the most difficult think in the world to shake off.”
“In most times and places, homicides kill far more people than wars. But homicide rates have been falling as well and not just in the U.S. People in the rest of the world are now seven-tenths as likely to be murdered as they were two dozen years ago”
“What causes all the hatred?… human beings operating under the influence of the reality-distortion fields convincing us that we and ours are in the right, that we are by nature good, and that, when we do the occasional bad thing, it’s not a reflection of the ‘real us’; whereas they and theirs aren’t in the right and aren’t by nature good, and when they do the occasional good thing, it’s not a reflection of the ‘real them.’”
“It’s a huge psychological achievement to accept other humans in their bewildering mixture of good and bad… no one we love will ever satisfy us completely—but that this is never a reason to hate them either. We should move away from the naivety and cruelty of splitting people into the camps of the awful and the wondrous, to the mature wisdom of integrating them into the large collective of the ‘good enough’.”
“‘proper work’ usually involves performing a task you hate on behalf of people you'd gleefully club to death with a bull's knee if only it were legal to do so.”
“as anyone in the hell of hatred knows, nothing binds you to the object of hatred ore than your own aversion”
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