The word "karma" holds many different meanings and interpretations. Here we mean cause and effect, consequences, the results of our thoughts, words, and deeds. This idea seems simple and obvious at first but actually has many layers of meaning. For example, the consequence of a certain action could seem very good because it enriches us physically but at the same time could seem very bad because it harms us psychologically. Goethe's archetypical book, Faust explores this dichotomy commonly known as "selling our souls to the devil."
“Jove weighs affairs of earth in dubious scales, and the good suffers, while the bad prevails.”
“For already I have once been a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird and a dumb sea fish.”
“one who loves will be loved by others and one who hates will be hated by others... I cannot understand how the men of the world can hear this doctrine of universality and still criticize it!”
“The excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction.. the most aggravated form of tyranny arises out of the most extreme form of liberty.”
“When leaders during times of peace and prosperity abandon themselves to pleasure-seeking and complacency, they unwittingly invite calamity. In all cases, either disaster or happiness arise from our choices.”
“We are born alone and die alone; experience the good and bad consequences of our karma alone; and we go alone to hell or the supreme abode”
“The fragrance of flowers spreads only in the directions of the wind. But, the goodness of a person spreads in all direction.”
“If you seek what you don’t have, what you do have will be lost. If you cultivate what you already have, then what you want comes about.”
“Rich are the rewards of the generous; profound are the calamities of the resentful… So, by looking into the source of people’s actions, sages can tell their consequences.”
“All the causes and results of positive and negative deeds have emerged merely from the symbols of conceptualizing thought... pacified by the emptiness which is without conceptual elaborations.”
“All the suffering there is in this world arises from wishing our self to be happy. All the happiness there is in this world arises from wishing others to be happy.”
“Old and sick final years over a hundred
Face brown head white content with mountain life
Cloth robe pulled tight I accept my karma
Why would I envy the clever ways of others?”
“When kings do not act out of happiness and anger, their punishments and rewards will not be excessive, nor will metal weapons and leather armor arise.”
“Everyone wants precious items and beautiful women but the Sage doesn’t allow them to throw his mind into chaos.”
“Listen: this story's one you ought to know,
You'll reap the consequence of what you sow.”
“Sesame oil is the essence. Although the ignorant know that it is in the sesame seed, they do not understand the way of cause, effect, and becoming and therefor are not able to extract the essence. In the same way, the guru shows the truth of tathata. If it is not shown by the guru, it cannot be realized just like the sesame oil that remains in the seed”
“Just as karma from past lifetimes cannot be sidestepped,
Wrinkles on one's forehead cannot be erased.”
“Bestowing honors embarrasses those who don’t receive them…Prizing treasures pains those who don’t possess them… Displaying attractions distresses those who don’t enjoy them to the point where they cause trouble.”
“And this delightful Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River's Lip on which we lean—
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!”
“Soft words soften the hearts that are harder than rock, harsh words harden hearts that are softer than silk.”
“If someone denies the existence of the effects arranged according to the causes, or if their wisdom cannot understand it, they have no true knowledge.”
“It is only belief in oneself as an island that creates the delusion of others apart and this split is the cause of anxiety.”
“Evil has its evil reward. Even the clever cannot escape… its retribution is ingenious and beyond the reach of human plans. It never lets evildoers slip through its net.”
“Let no man lose heart from thinking that he cannot do what others have done before him… men are born, and live, and die, always in accordance with the same rules.”
“Whenever we endeavor to bring about our own perfection, or that of others, by our own efforts, the result is simply imperfection.”
“The same motives always produce the same actions; the same events follow from the same causes”
“In human life the most important scenes will depend upon the character of a single actor... An acrimonious humor falling upon a single fiber of one man my prevent or suspend the misery of nations.”
“the beginning presupposes the end almost as much as the end presupposes the beginning”
“Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice... Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death.”
“You could construe abandoning all hope of results as being to your welfare. For example fame, renown, comfort, and happiness in this life, later happiness among gods or men, even the desire to achieve the transcendence of misery itself.”
“Others will enjoy the wealth we as misers kept. Even our body we hold so dear will be left behind.”
“It is impossible to deny that dishonest men often grow rich and famous, becoming powerful in their parish or in parliament. Their portraits simper from shop windows; and they live and die respected. This success is theirs; yet it is not the success which a noble soul will envy.”
“Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures.”
“all the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a former woe... as the most poisonous reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest songster of the grove; so equally with every felicity, all miserable events do naturally beget their like”
“A task too strong for wizard spells
This squire has brought about;
'Tis easy dropping stones in wells,
But who shall get them out?”
“Our deeds still travel with us from afar,
And what we have been makes us what we are.”
“It seems, in fact, as though the second half of man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.”
“A man is the resultant and exponent of all the forces that have been brought to bear upon him, whether before his birth or afterwards... as he is by nature, and as he has been acted on, and is now acted on from without, so will he do, as certainly and regularly as though he were a machine.”
“Good judgment is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgment.”
“When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory — must follow it, cannot help but follow it.”
“Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.”
“The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.”
“We imagine the future as a reflection of the present projected into empty space, whereas it is the result—often the imminent result—of causes which for the most part escape us.”
“as in the past, so in the future, the wrong we have done, thought, or intended will wreak its vengeance on our souls.”
“She was a murderess, but on top of that she had also murdered herself. For one who commits such a crime destroys her own soul... Sometimes it seems as if even animals and plants 'know' it.”
“He is resolved to forget that the desperate clinging to the self, and the desperate clinging to life are the surest way to eternal death.”
“What could I say to you that would be of value, except that perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.”
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
“In each of us, the entire history of the world is reflected. And however autonomous our soul, it is indebted to an inheritance worked upon it from all sides—before it came into being—by the totality of the earth's energies.”
“Many causes produce war. There are ancient hatreds, turbulent frontiers, the 'legacy of old forgotten, far-off things, and battles long ago.' There are new-born fanaticisms.”
“In the end nothing is lost; for good or evil, every event has effects forever.”
“you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had... And so it is with a city, a country, a race... It is only the past that lives.”
“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them, finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons.”
“Surely it is the right wish that draws us to the right place. Nothing of importance happens accidentally in our life.”
“The I Ching is actually concerned with nothing other than the recognition of causes and conditions which determine our destiny. He who knows the causes, or sees the germinations, controls what is otherwise felt as fate.”
“Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.”
“Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place.”
“We can never speak of cause and effect in an absolute way, but that an event is a cause of another event which is its effect, relative to some universal law. However, these universal laws are very often so trivial that as a rule we take them for granted instead of making conscious use of them.”
“Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, and Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself… Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.”
“But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster.”
“Yama Raja executes the law of karma, making visible to the dead the totality of their pas actions in the mirror of karma.”
“The neglect, indeed the rejection, of wisdom has gone so far that most of our intellectuals have not even the faintest idea what the term could mean. As a result, they always tend to try and cure a disease by intensifying its causes. The disease having been caused by allowing cleverness to displace wisdom, no amount of clever research is likely to produce a cure.”
“We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.”
“I feel the hot winds of karma driving me. Nevertheless I remain here. I must not shrink from the clear white light”
“Every kind of ignorance in the world all results from not realizing that our perceptions are gambles. We believe what we see and then we believe our interpretation of it, we don't even know we are making an interpretation most of the time. We think this is reality.”
“It isn't the things that happen to us in our lives that cause us to suffer, it's how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.”
“nowness is not a way of seeing the truth; nowness is being true... You have to stop running in order to ask questions, and this cuts the chain reaction of karmic energy”
“Saving fish from drowning... saving people for their own good... killing them as an unfortunate consequence of saving them... like Vietnam, Bosnia... you can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays the consequences”
“All the things we are commonly blamed or praised for—ranging from murder to theft to Darwin’s eminently Victorian politeness—are the result not of choices made by some immaterial 'I' but of physical necessity.”
“The karma of global warming is not nature turning against us—we have turned against ourselves. We are doing something hostile to nature.”
“I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break… So it's all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time.”
“Everything you think, everything you say, and everything you do is reflected back to you as your own experience. If you cause someone pain, you experience pain ten times worse. If you promote others' happiness and well-being, you experience the same happiness ten times over. If your own mind is calm, then the people around you will experience a similar degree of calmness.”
“Every point in history is a crossroads. A single traveled road leads from the past to the present, but myriad paths fork off into the future.”
“The myth of the pivotal event has done considerable damage to our understanding of cause and effect as it relates to human affairs... For those who wish to predict the future—or avoid the mistakes of the past—pivotal moments are among the most dangerous of history's artifacts.”
“we often use the language of karma to describe the relationship between intentional actions and their full range of results... Our actions have ripple effects beyond the direct results we readily perceive”
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