Scribbled Chronicles

Nutritor non barbarus.
Don't feed the trolls.

A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.

~ Leo Tolstoy, "Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence", 1886

If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals.

~ Leo Tolstoy, "The First Step" (1892)

Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? [...]

If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth — certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

~ Henry David Thoreau, "Resistance to Civil Government" aka "Civil Disobedience", 1849

How does this affect my practice?
It doesn't.
These reported events are like an arrow shot at my heart but landing at my feet.
I choose not to bend over, pick it up, and stab myself with it.

~ unattributed writer in a Buddhist discussion group

The mind is malleable. Our life can be greatly transformed by even a minimal change in how we manage our thoughts and perceive and interpret the world. Happiness is a skill. It requires effort and time.

~ Matthieu Ricard, French academic-turned-Buddhist monk

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!" [...]

"It's me that's changed and done all this and come and gone and complained and hurt and joyed and yelled, not the Void" [...] Then I added "Blah", with a little grin, because I knew that that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world. [...]

No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.

~ Jack Kerouac (various works)

Aw, man. You made friends with them. See, friendship is the booze they feed you. They want you to get drunk on feeling like you belong. [...] They make you feel cool. And hey, I met you: you are not cool. [...] [W]e're uncool. And while women will always be a problem for us, most of the great art in the world is about that very same problem. Good-looking people don't have any spine; their art never lasts. They get the girls, but we're smarter. [...] Yeah, great art is about conflict and pain and guilt and longing and love disguised as sex, and sex disguised as love... and let's face it, you got a big head start. [...] The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool.

~ from Almost Famous

In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.

~ Marcel Proust