"Nirvana" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... would be more correct to look upon the German State as a Teutonic Nirvana—with this distinction, that it is a negation of personal individuality, but at the same time a huge, collective positive. The individual German fulfils his life's mission by absorption into Nirvana and by having all ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... NIRVANA.—Buddha taught, (1) that existence is always attended with misery; (2) that all modes of misery result from passion, or desire unsatisfied; (3) that desire must be quenched; (4) that there are four steps in doing this, and thus of arriving ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... forth, Out to the western sky still bright with noon, I feel well spurred and booted for the strife That ends not till Nirvana is attained. ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... earrings in their ears, and strange curls of grey hair at the side of their heads. They looked as if they might have been sitting there for years—as if they might be the crew of some long-foundered vessel to whom has been accorded a Nirvana of endless tavern-fellowship. None of them took any notice of Mr Sharnall, for music was exercising its transporting power, and their thoughts were far away. Some were with old Cullerne whalers, with the harpoon and the ice-floe; some dreamt of square-stemmed ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... of Nirvana lay upon the land, and, brooding in it, my elbow on the warm iron girder of the footbridge (it is a forty-shilling fine to cross by any other means), I perceived, as never before, how the consequences of our acts run eternal through time and through space. If we impinge never so slightly ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... street-cars seems to be sent out nightly on some extended excursion with orders never to let their gongs fall silent, and long before dawn even the few who have succeeded in falling into a doze are snatched awake by an atrocious din of church-bells sufficient in number to supply heaven, nirvana, the realm of houris, and the Irish section of purgatory, with enough left over to furnish boiling pots for the more crowded section of the Hereafter. Then with a dim suggestion of dawn every living dog and fighting-cock, ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... person dies a lama must be present to see that the soul is properly separated from the body and to direct the spirit on its journey to paradise; the lama must also influence its rebirth in a happy existence and provide for its entrance upon Nirvana, or eternal rest. ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... relaxed—oppressed with a benumbing, sodden silence—the silence of a primordial world. Such a silence as must have brooded over the Face of the Waters on the Eve of Creation—desolate, desolate, as though a colossal, invisible pillar—a pillar of the Infinitely Still, the pillar of Nirvana—rose forever into the empty blue, human life an atom of microscopic dust crushed under its basis, and at the summit God Himself. And I find time to ask myself why, at this of all moments of my tiny life-span, I am able to write as I do, registering impressions, keeping a finger upon the pulse ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... be occupied. Most of the occupants were lying motionless, but one or two were noisily sucking at the opium-pipes. These had not yet attained to the opium-smokers Nirvana. So much did Gaston Max, a trained observer, gather in one swift glance. Then Ah-Fang-Fu, leaving the lantern in the shop, descended the four steps and crossing the room began to arrange two mats with round head-cushions ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... demanda alors la permission de rester dans le temple, et elle passa le reste de sa vie faire du bien. Enfin elle mourut aussi et passa dans l'endroit immortel des Hindous, dans le Nirvana,[30] o elle ne souffrit plus jamais, et o elle trouva le bonheur complet et le repos qu'elle cherchait depuis ...
— Contes et lgendes - 1re Partie • H. A. Guerber
... "Our meeting was entirely accidental. He had no idea of finding me; was as surprised as I was." She stopped abruptly, musing on some unpalatable thought. "You wouldn't know him, Linda. He is a perfect freak," she said, presently, "talks about Karma and Nirvana and I don't know what all! Whether he's a Theosophist or a Brahmin I ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... Burmah, however, the idea of the eternity of the Deity had evidently been lost, and Gautama had practically usurped the place that the higher Buddhists gave to Brahma. Indeed, though the true Buddhist system looks to the absorption in the Deity,—Nirvana, as it is called,—the popular notion, as received in Burmah and corrupted by less refined minds, made it into what was either absolute nonentity or could not be distinguished from it, so that the ordinary Burman's best hope for the future ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... ordinary history that was printed in the lines of her feverish little palm, as it was no ordinary character that looked out from her intense pathetic face. There was something almost as interesting here as a meditation on the mystic Nirvana or a discourse on that persistent residuum of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... varied environment of earthly life spring, through adaptation, the varied powers and varied sensibilities, susceptibilities to joy and pain as well as the rest. The greater the sensitiveness the greater the capacity for suffering. Hence the "quenching of desire," the "turning toward Nirvana, the desire to escape from the hideous bustle of a world in which we are able to take no part, is a natural impulse with the soul which feels but cannot or will ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... (2e. serie, t. ii. p. 62) that the ultimate result was almost the nirvana of Budhism. It will be observed, that the view taken in the text concerning the Neo-Platonic philosophy, for which I am largely indebted to Pressense, is different from that which regards it as monotheism, and which has been made popular by Mr. Kingsley's ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... felt too sad to be curious or to go for the stenographer, but I remember very distinctly the sounds of the last few words he uttered, which were twice repeated. These I wrote down and sent away. I found the translation of the words was; "After a brief bird life I shall find Nirvana." ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... unfamiliar stars were out. There was enough light now for them to see Maya's tomb not far away. It seemed to be fashioned of moonbeams. It was such a perfect copy of the Taj Mahal that here both death and sleep were brothers—and a nirvana of peace hung over it in ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... languages of expression and gesture. These were surely the very first auxiliaries of uttered speech, and in the same way we find that they constitute the first sign of advance in primitive melody. Savages utter the same thought over and over again, evidently groping after that semblance of Nirvana (or perhaps it may be better described as "hypnotic exaltation") which the incessant repetition of that one thought, accompanied by its vibrating shadow, sound, ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... time, would not the daily harvesting of wisdom render unnecessary the long Devachanic years? No second harvest could be reaped from fields where the sheaves are already garnered. Thus disregarding the fruits of action, we could work like those who have made the Great Sacrifice, for whom even Nirvana is no resting place. Worlds may awaken in nebulous glory, pass through their phases of self-conscious existence and sink again to sleep, but these tireless workers continue their age-long task of help. Their motive we do not know, but in some ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... men began to fall upon one another with naked swords. Their savage lust of battle was aroused. To fight, to kill, to die with cold steel buried in their vitals! Ah, that to them was Nirvana. ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... am not here under this pine tree. The balmy air of spring whispers through the sweet grass, The stars sparkle, the whippoorwill calls, But thou grievest, while my soul lies rapturous In the blest Nirvana of eternal light! Go to the good heart that is my husband Who broods upon what he calls our guilty love:— Tell him that my love for you, no less than my love for him Wrought out my destiny—that through the flesh ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... keep him under as long as I dare. After all"—the doctor, who prided himself on his lack of emotion, for once betrayed a glimpse of the real humanity beneath the rather grim exterior—"he'll have to serve a life-sentence in the way of regret, and one can't grudge the poor wretch an hour or two's Nirvana." ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... thorough-going stoics in the world. Epictetus declared with an oath that he should be glad to see one.[7] To take everything as equally good, to know no difference between bitter and sweet, penury and plenty, slander and praise,—this is a great attainment, a Nirvana to which few can hope to arrive. Some wise man has said (and the remark has more meaning than may at once appear) that dying is usually one of the last things which men do ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... the Tangs even as their notion of life differed. They sought to actualize what their predecessors tried to symbolise. To the Neo-Confucian mind the cosmic law was not reflected in the phenomenal world, but the phenomenal world was the cosmic law itself. Aeons were but moments—Nirvana always within grasp. The Taoist conception that immortality lay in the eternal change permeated all their modes of thought. It was the process, not the deed, which was interesting. It was the completing, not the completion, which was really vital. Man came thus at once face to face with nature. ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... latticed balcony that encircles an inner court where cabaret features are held—suggestive of a bull ring. One rather piquant Spanish girl, playing her accompaniment on a guitar, gazed softly up at Tommy while singing about some wonderful Nirvana, an enchanted island that floated in a sea of love. It was a pretty song, even if more intense than temperate, and pleased with it he tossed her a coin; whereupon she tilted her chin and raised a shoulder, asking in the universal language of cabarets if she should not come up and ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... came to Japan, one of them, climbing Fuji, noticed that around its sunken crater were eight peaks, like the petals of their sacred lotus flower. Thus, it seemed to them, Great Buddha had honored Japan, by bestowing the sacred symbol of Nirvana, or Heaven, on the proudest and highest part of Japan. So they also named it Fuji, "the sacred mountain"; and to this day all the world calls this sacred mountain Fuji, or Fusi Yama, while the Japanese people believe that the earth which sunk in Omi is the same which, piled ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... consist in absolute rest, the Oriental astrologers conceived a state of eternal and unconscious repose, equivalent to soul absorption, to which they gave the name of Nirvana, into which they taught that, by the awards of the gods, the souls of the righteous, or those who had lived what they called "the contemplative life," would be permitted to enter immediately after death. But, for the souls of sinners, they ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... morality, an honest mind, a pure heart—all words meaning: a balance must be struck. The strong must not be too strong; the weak not too weak. But without variation how could the balance be maintained? Nirvana! Nirvana! The ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... back of your mask is the great Individual—the Indivisible—the Universal Life, in which you are a centre of consciousness and activity. This does not wipe out your identity—instead it gives you a greater and grander identity. Instead of your sinking into a Nirvana of extinction of consciousness, your consciousness so enlarges as you unfold, that you will in the end feel your identity to be the identity of the Universe. Instead of your gaining Nothingness, you gain Allness. All spiritual growth and unfoldment gives you a constantly increasing ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... and though it was only a taste, it had flown to our brains like heavy wine, and the headaches and the heartaches followed fast. For some it was more than a heartache; to them it brought the deep, drugged sleep of Nirvana. ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... the poetic creed of an impersonal and impassive art was more or less blended with a materialism pervaded with a buddhistic pessimism that is vexed and wearied with the vain motions of this human world, and longs for the rest of Nirvana; and this vexation and weariness frequently rise to a poignant intensity. However far he may then be thought to be from the impassive impersonality of his doctrine, there is but one opinion as to his rare command of form and the exquisite perfection ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... to hold thirty odd monsters like that, let alone this noble prince, "with godlike face and eyes enwrapped, lost in care for them he knew not, save as fellow lives." There is a mistake somewhere. There wuz lots of natives round worshippin' it. But I felt that if Prince Siddartha could speak out of Nirvana he would say: ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... eighteenth or chapel-cave were originally layanas or monastic dwellings and contained no images when first their makers gazed upon their work and found it good. But long after their earliest inmates had conquered Desire and had gained Nirvana for their souls the followers of the Mahayana school from Northern India took the dwellings for their own use and carved out of the austere walls of their precursors' cells those images and idols which are now the chief feature of the caves. ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... after Christ, the faith of Buddha was driven out of almost every part of India. But Buddhism has a profound missionary spirit, like that of Christianity, Buddha having commanded his disciples to make known to all men the way to Nirvana and consequently during the very period when India was being lost, the missionaries of the reformed creed were spreading the teachings of their master among the peoples of all the countries of Eastern Asia, so that to-day Buddhism is the religion of almost one third of the human race. Buddha has ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... is Nirvana. What Nirvana is the learned do not agree. But, since the best original authorities tell us there is neither desire nor activity, nor any possibility of phenomenal reappearance for the sage who has entered Nirvana, it may ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... away with our treasure, we read aloud from the orange coloured volume, in turns, as we strolled along, until at last we sat down on the bulging root of an elm tree in a secluded lane. Here we stayed, in a sort of poetical nirvana, reading, reading, forgetting the passage of time, until the hour of our neglected mid-day meal was a long while past, and we had to hurry home to bread ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... Brahmanic or Buddhistic, teach as their cardinal doctrine that life is an evil. Buddhism is more pronounced in this, for it teaches more emphatically than even the Kosekin that the chief end of man is to get rid of the curse of life and gain the bliss of Nirvana, or annihilation. True, it does not take so practical a form as among the Kosekin, yet it is believed by one-third of the human race as the foundation of the religion in which they live and die. We need not go to the Kosekin, however, for such maxims as these. The intelligent ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... Colonel, rousing himself from a brief nirvana of digestion, "I hope that you will not be dull." He said it with the confidence of a man who has just laid before you a pretty convincing sample of ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... display. He stood, sometimes air-bulb in hand, an hour or two, then folded his camera tent and stole away. Five hours had passed and night was near. Everybody was gone. I lay down on the ground to convince myself that I was perfectly patient. I attained so nearly to Nirvana that a little ground squirrel came and ran over me, kissing my hand ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... infinite causes the act could not have resulted. If it be something that affected a life, and had it not happened then the life would have drifted somewhere else. In the end it would have reached the same harbor of Nirvana. But the life would not have been the same. A drop of water falls on the Rocky Mountains, it trickles along, going around through pebbles and grains of sand; it joins with others, meets trees and roots, winds and twists ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... quiescent living things were ready to start into action, all took the senses with somnolence. That drowsy joy, that soothing silence which seemed only intensified by the murmur of bees and the faint gurgle of water, were like medicine to the soul; and it seemed that the conception of Nirvana became easily understood as the delicious open-air reverie grew more and more involved and vague. Then the last look of the sun, the creeping shadows that made the sea gray and turned the little lake to an inky hue, and then the slow fall of the quiet-coloured ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... abides for aeons in a state of ecstatic being. But, beyond even this transcendent state, there is another, which is called the "Circle of the Infinite," or "Ceugant," which is identical with the "Union with God" of the Persians and Greek Mystics, or the "Nirvana" of the Hindus. Rather an advanced form of philosophy for "barbarians," is it not? Particularly when contrasted with the crude mythology of the ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... when a dense group became uneasy and pushed one another about were the tongue springs slightly loosened. Even the nervous antennae were quiet after the insects had settled. They seemed to have achieved a Rhopaloceran Nirvana, content to rest motionless until caught up in the temporary whirlwinds of restlessness which ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... there were, spirits of great power like angels, and there was the Buddha (the just man made perfect), who had worked out for all men the way to reach surcease from evil; but of God I saw nothing. And because the Buddha had reached heaven (Nirvana), it would be useless to pray to him. For, having entered into his perfect rest, he could not be disturbed by the sharp cry of those suffering below; and if he heard, still he could not help; for each man must through pain and sorrow work out for himself his own ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... wrote the younger poet at a later time. He did not have time, however, to act on this encouragement. He wrote now and then a dialect poem which was printed in the Georgia dailies and attracted attention by its humor and its insight into contemporary life, and occasionally an exquisite lyric like "Nirvana". In the main he ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... me to write the same word differently in different places, e.g. sometimes Ajatasatru and sometimes Ajatasattu, just as in a book dealing with Greek and Latin mythology one might employ both Herakles and Hercules. Also many Indian names such as Ramayana, Krishna, nirvana have become Europeanized or at least are familiar to all Europeans interested in Indian literature. It seems pedantic to write them with their full and accurate complement of accents and dots and my general practice is to give such words ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... called Tirthakar or 'The Finder of the Ford,' through the ocean of existence. [273] But Jainism differs from Buddhism in that it holds that the soul, when finally emancipated, reaches a heaven and there continues for ever a separate intellectual existence, and is not absorbed into Nirvana or a state ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... traces of it can be found in some Buddhistic sects in China. Mahayana Buddhism, on the other hand, developed into a true popular religion of salvation. It did not interfere with the indigenous deities and did not discountenance life in human society; it did not recommend Nirvana at once, but placed before it a here-after with all the joys worth striving for. In this form Buddhism was certain of success in Asia. On its way from India to China it divided into countless separate streams, each characterized ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... form. I behold my own unclothing; I forget, still more than I am forgotten; I pass gently into the grave while still living, and I feel, as it were, the indescribable peace of annihilation, and the dim quiet of the Nirvana. I am conscious of the river of time passing before and in me, of the impalpable shadows of life gliding past me, but nothing breaks the ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the second gallery contains, in the upper row, bas-reliefs representing scenes connected with the history of Prince Siddhartha (Gautama) from his infancy to the period when he attained Nirvana. ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... relationships and activities in which discarnate personality realizes and expresses itself. Our racial curiosities about the state of the dead are quenchless. Every religion has its creeds, its dreams, its assurances. From the Nirvana of the Buddhist to the ardent paradise of the Mohammedan, faith and longing have built their structure and peopled it with their dead. Great ranges of literature are coloured by such speculations. Christian hymnology is instinct with them and not a little of our noblest poetry. We have ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... stretched on the deck outside the combing of the cockpit. Nirvana had no attraction for him. He resented forced inactivity as an unendurable wrong. Instead of smoking with half-closed eyes, he peered eagerly forward under the sail. He noted everything—the floating gulls and puffins, the stiff, ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... of men, as that is greater than the lowest brutes. Above all these elements of man, controlling all, and preserving its individuality throughout, is "spirit." Yet even this, when absorbed into Nirvana, is lost in that great whole which includes all things and is Nature herself. Lost, do I say?—yes, lost for inconceivable ages upon ages, yet destined to come forth again at some moment in eternity, and to begin its round through the ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... his redemption. As an account of the origin of things, that is admirable! According to the doctrines of Buddhism, the world came into being as the result of some inexplicable disturbance in the heavenly calm of Nirvana, that blessed state obtained by expiation, which had endured so long a time—the change taking place by a kind of fatality. This explanation must be understood as having at bottom some moral bearing; although it ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... took out a small phial and poured some few drops of a dark liquid on the girl's tongue. Half consciously swallowing it, she sank back again—this time, into a deeper nirvana. ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... Nature! she will not let her children be mishandled too far. "This is too much," she says; "this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable." And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its homecoming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a very homely, ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... (p. 68)—one does not quite see the reason for this long campaign against death. Surely the logical consummation would be an ultimate racial euthanasia, an absorption of humanity into God, a vast apotheosis-nirvana, after which the earth and sun could go on ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... reckless gayety. He stopped poker—resolutely—he couldn't afford to lose now; and, what puzzled me, he stopped drinking. The man simply looked tired, always hopelessly tired; and I could believe him sincere in all his foolish talk about his blessed Nirvana: which was the peace he craved, which was ...
— 'Hell fer Sartain' and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... into Nirvana I must relate what I saw in the country of the Christians. It was not a dream. It was too real. And yet it is to be, for it has not yet happened. The Campagna was now become a shallow lake from the sea almost to the Sabine Mountains. What had ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... out and help Molly pick daisies!" And, since one's here, and the Spring's in the garden (How many lives hence will that thought earn pardon?) Since one's a man and man's heart is insistent, And, since Nirvana is doubtful and distant, Though life's a hard road and thorny to travel— Stones in the borders and grass on the gravel, Still there's the wisdom that wise men call folly, Still one can go and pick ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... plainly of the inmost heart of the Faith, raising up in him the firm foundation of that teaching. Therefore he certainly received at that time the true meaning of the Divine Promise of universal salvation, and attained unto the imperishable faith by which alone the ignorant can enter into Nirvana without condition or price. ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin
... crowd, and idlers carried tales into dark, basement recesses, and one knew not which was friend or foe. Meanwhile the Winged Lion, with those terrible, jeweled, glaring eyes, and the primitive patron San Teodoro—each high on his column, in a Nirvana of quiescence—kept solemn semblance of vigil over that dread space where sometimes a horror of which one dared not speak scattered the sunshine high in air between those silent wardens of San Marco. Yet the horror of those figures swinging lifeless, with veiled faces, ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... we do know, that they looked to the sun, their recognized lord and protector, as he who would care for them at death, and admit them to his palaces. There—not, indeed, exquisite joys—but a life of unruffled placidity, void of labor, vacant of strong emotions, a sort of material Nirvana, awaited them.[244-3] For these reasons, they, with most other American nations, interred the corpse lying east and west, and not as the traveller Meyen has suggested,[244-4] from the reminiscences of some ancient migration. Beyond the ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... without a personal God, Buddhism deifies the soul of man and exalts the individual through countless experiences of physical embodiment into a position of apparently infinite wisdom—a condition beyond phenomenal existence and of course indescribable. It neither annihilates life in nirvana nor admits immortal existence as we understand existence—i.e., in a perpetually objective form of some sort. It is better in some respects, though older, than Christism. Buddhas and Christs alike, we are taught, are only men sent from celestial congress to direct ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... creature outside of myself that I ever found myself in,' he said. 'And I could look into you like Narcissus until I died. You are home and Nirvana. That's what you are. When I look at you I believe in God. You gallantest, most foolhardy, little, fragile thing, you, you're not afraid of anything. You trust this rotten life, don't you? You expect to find lovely things everywhere, ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... faces of the monks, and at one moment longs to attain to their peace by renunciation, longs for Nirvana; "then, when one comes out again into the hot sunshine that warms one's blood, and sees the eager hurrying faces of men and women in the street, dramatic faces over which the disturbing experiences of life have passed and left their symbols, one's heart thrills up into ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... do, and I love them, but even among them, Buddha has not said the last word of wisdom. Do you remember that Bodhisattva, the Master of Pity, who swore not to become Buddha, never to find freedom in Nirvana, until he had cured all pain, redeemed all crimes, consoled ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... metal doors once swung. Above the square terraces are three circular terraces, where seventy-two latticed dagabas (reliquaries in the shape of the calyx or bud of the lotus) inclose each a seated image, seventy-two more Buddhas sitting in those inner, upper circles, of Nirvana, facing a great dagaba, or final cupola, the exact function or purpose of which as key to the whole structure is still the puzzle of archaeologists. This final shrine is fifty feet in diameter, and either covered ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... perfect unity, like the perfected life of the Buddhist, Nirvana or Nibbana (literally "dying out" or "extinction" as of an expiring fire), there is no room for variety, for the play of life; all such fretfulness ceases, to be replaced by an all-pervading calm, beautiful, if you like, ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... negativeness &c adj.; nullity; nihility^, nihilism; tabula rasa [Lat.], blank; abeyance; absence &c 187; no such thing &c 4; nonbeing, nothingness, oblivion. annihilation; extinction &c (destruction) 162; extinguishment, extirpation, Nirvana, obliteration. V. not exist &c 1; have no existence &c 1; be null and void; cease to exist &c 1; pass away, perish; be extinct, become extinct &c adj.; die out; disappear &c 449; melt away, dissolve, leave not a rack behind; go, be no more; die &c 360. annihilate, render null, nullify; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... friends who are touched with Buddhism just now and much puzzled to describe, and I judge even to imagine, their heaven, I confidently recommend a week's continuous jar upon a rough railway as the surest preparation for attaining a just conception of Nirvana, where perfect rest is held the greatest possible bliss. Lying, as I did apparently, upon air cushions, and rocked so softly on the waves, I had not a wish; desire was gone; I was content; every particle of my weary body seemed bathed in delight. Here was the delicious ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... a delight. This uncertainty has been removed from the modern Dream Shop. Nowadays, our drugs are carefully measured, mixed, and metered for each individual. There is an absolute precision in dream-making, ranging from the Nirvana-like calm of Black Slipper through the multicolored hallucinations of peyotl and tri-narcotine, to the sexual fantasies induced by nace and morphine, and at last to the memory-resurrecting dreams of ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... to him is the illusoriness and hollowness of things when taken in the spirit of active endeavor. The only profound and abiding good is nothingness. While nature and society conspire to mock him, Nirvana invites him to its peace. The religious course of his life consists in the use of such means as can win him this end. From the stand-point of the universe he has the sympathy only of that wisdom whose essence is self-destruction. And this truth is ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Nirvana, for each spirit will for eternity have its individuality, and its activity will be unremitting in seeing God face to face—a vision that will cause the spirit increasing wonder in an act that will ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... overrun by savages more fierce than those who sacked Rome, were occupied by a placid people, thriving, industrious, and intelligent; devoting their lives to the attainment of that serene annihilation which the word nirvana expresses. When we reflect on the revolutions which time effects, and observe how the home of learning and progress changes as the years pass by, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion, perhaps a mournful one, that the sun of civilisation can never shine ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... faces of the monks, and at one moment longs to attain to their peace by renunciation, longs for Nirvana; 'then, when one comes out again into the hot sunshine that warms one's blood, and sees the eager hurrying faces of men and women in the street, dramatic faces over which the disturbing experiences of life have passed and left their symbols, one's heart thrills up into one's ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... people, it was but fitting that she should take up her duties as the daughter of an impoverished family of high rank. The father, grown old and feeble, gave up the battle for existence, and being a devout Buddhist, turned his thoughts upon Nirvana, which he strove diligently to enter by perpetual meditation and prayer. The mother, used to guidance and unable to think or plan for herself, turned helplessly to ...
— Little Sister Snow • Frances Little
... lookout could do no more than follow its fainting light as the dark of the tropics closed in. An hour the Noa-Noa lay gently heaving upon the mysterious waters in which the despairing pundit had sought Nirvana, until the boat returned with a report that it had picked up the buoy, but had seen no sign of the man. Doubtless he had been swept into the propellers, but if not quickly given release in their cyclopean strokes, he may have watched for a few minutes our vain attempt to negative ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... wounds. Mr. Shaw has waived such claims, having, as Vivie's grandmother would have said, "other fish to fry." But for this I should not have ventured to take up the tale, as I hold an author while he lives has a prescriptive right to his creations. I shall feel no bitterness in Nirvana if, after my death, another continues the story of Vivie or of her friends and collateral relations, under circumstances which I shall ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... nothing more to do or to see, then he became master of himself and conducted himself accordingly. Contemplation, accompanied by a cigarette, was now his chief good. What his meditations were no one knew, but they sufficed unto himself. He had attained Nirvana. He lived in ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... he was a success. A specialist is a deformity contrived by Nature to get the work done. Socrates was a thought-specialist, and the laziest man who ever lived in a strenuous age. The desire of his life was to live without desire—which is essentially the thought of Nirvana. He had the power never to exercise his power except ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... and the sooner we see this and yield ourselves in obedience, not like "dumb driven cattle" but as self-respecting, self-asserting mortals—within the law of accord with the highest—the sooner shall we enter into that "Nirvana" which is "peace." ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... candidate for the sleepership; a prodigiously comfortable bed; dead silence, not so much as an owl in the still night she looked out into during an excursion warranted to promote sleep—but never sleep itself! She had been dragged reluctantly from a dreamless Nirvana into the presence of a waking nightmare—two great beautiful eyes that looked at her and saw nothing; and this coercion, she somehow felt, was really due to an unaccountable absence of mind on her part. Surely she could have kept asleep with a little more common sense. She would go back from that ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... judged the o-omi to be swayed solely by personal ambition, and he placed no faith in the sincerity of the great official's Buddhist propaganda. Meanwhile, the fortunes of the new faith prospered. When the dying Emperor, Yomei, asked to be qualified for Nirvana, priests were summoned from Kudara. They came in 588, the first year of Sushun's reign, carrying relics (sarira), and they were accompanied by ascetics, temple-architects, metal-founders, potters, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... translate the poetry of the great exponent of Quietism, Madame Guyon. The theme of all the pieces which Cowper has translated is the same—Divine Love and the raptures of the heart that enjoys it—the blissful union of the drop with the Ocean—the Evangelical Nirvana. If this line of thought was not altogether healthy, or conducive to the vigorous performance of practical duty, it was at all events better than the dark fancy of Reprobation. In his admiration of Madame Guyon, her translator showed his affinity, and that of ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... to mysticism, in which aesthetic, erotic, and all kinds of morbid and ill-defined tendencies were united, which was more than anything else tinged with a semi-Asiatic quietism, a longing for the passive ecstasy of Nirvana. This religious side of mediaeval life was also gratified by the Arthurian romances. Oddly enough, there existed an old Welsh or Breton tale about the boy Peredur, who from a complete simpleton became the prince of chivalry, and his many adventures connected with a certain mysterious ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... disaster. "Thus the matter rests. 'Tis not this Shimo who is the cause of these nightly scenes of strife and pain. In mad chase Shu[u]zen Dono, the Okusama, the villainous Nishioka and his concubines, act the scene of their cutting off. Shimo has but her part, to find Nirvana in the worship of the upright. Deign this act of kindness." At the fierceness of the voice Endo[u] Saburo[u]zaemon started. The red light of dawn was pouring into the open room. All sight of the dreadful vision had faded from the wall before him. Vision, or fact? It ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville |
