Nirvana Quotes
Nirvana, n. Buddhist beautitude, i.e. extinction of individuality & absorption into the supreme spirit. – The Concise Oxford Dictionary
To be without ambition of any sort is Heaven, Nirvana, the state of the blessed.. I’ve been hag-ridden with ambition. It burns you up. It eats you alive. … I want to be without it. – Tallulah Bankhead
Yes, there is a Nirvanah; it is leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem. – Kahlil Gibran
The deeper the development of insight prior to entering nirvana, the higher the level of attainment, and the more pervasive the consequent personality changes. – Daniel Goleman
What is higher or low depends the quality of our state of consciousness within a given state Hence Nirvana is not the top of the ladder any more than sleep or death are. It can take place at any level of our consciousness. – Satprem, Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
One does not actually go HIGHER as one passes into Nirvana. One merely pierces a hole and goes out. … Strive to develop your inner individuality, and you will become able to enter these same regions fully conscious. – Satprem, ibid.
Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day is come. – Rabindranath Tagore
RESURRECTION OR NIRVANA
William Johnston on deeper healing
“Healing in Christianity is a process of death and resurrection in which man, anguished in his existential separation from Christ and from other men and from the cosmos, is once more united with the one he loves and for whom he longs. In Buddhism there is a similar pattern. It is precisely because the self cuts man off from the whole that it must die; and it is by death and the loss of self that man enters into nirvana or union with the cosmos. A friend of mine, a Catholic priest, who practised some Zen told me that the Zen master once said to him with some severity, ‘God sent his only Son into the world to die. And you must die too. So die!’ This is one more example of Buddhist ability to see the relevance of Christian dogma for daily living. How well he saw that as Christ died, his followers must die too if they are to enter into resurrection.
Buddhism, then, sees the necessity of death and of radical detachment as the gateway to nirvana. While I would not equate nirvana and resurrection (that would be an unpardonable oversimplification), I do believe that both concepts are striving to answer man’s most terrible and most basic question – how to be healed from the anguish of separation and loneliness and isolation and death. In both religions death is conquered because it is the gateway to something else. Perhaps resurrection is a clearer affirmation of something hinted at by nirvana.”
– William Johnston, in Silent Music, The Science of Meditation, 1974 (The deeper healing, p. 130)