Sentient Beings Quotes - Page 5

• We are all given a gift of existence and of being sentient beings, and I think true happiness lies in love and compassion.

  Adam Pascal

  Atheist, Lying, Thinking

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• Fools! You think of "god" as a sentient being. God is the word used to represent a force. This force created nothing, it just helps things along. It does not answer prayers, although it may make you think of a way to solve a problem. It has the power to influence you, but not decide for you.

  Diogenes

  Religious, Prayer, Thinking

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• It is time to fill the world with strong and powerful deeds. It is common knowledge that no great captain in the world has ever destroyed all of his enemies and lived with a sense of satisfaction. If one enemy is killed, two more will appear. It is important we cultivate love and compassion to all the sentient beings which is the way to bring peace to all.

  Dalai Lama

  Strong, Powerful, Compassion

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• If all sentient beings in the universe disappeared, there would remain a sense in which mathematical objects and theorems would continue to exist even though there would be no one around to write or talk about them. Huge prime numbers would continue to be prime, even if no one had proved them prime.

  Martin Gardner

  Writing, Science, Numbers

  Martin Gardner (2009). “When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish: And Other Speculations About This and That”, p.124, Macmillan

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• Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.

  Charles Darwin

  Believe, Men, Long

  Charles Darwin (2003). “On the Origin of Species”, p.433, Broadview Press

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• Lack of understanding of the true nature of happiness, it seems to me, is the principal reason why people inflict sufferings on others. They think either that the other's pain may somehow be a cause of happiness for themselves or that their own happiness is more important, regardless of what pain it may cause. But this is shortsighted. No one truly benefits from causing harm to another sentient being. . . . . In the long run causing others misery and infringing their rights to peace and happiness result in anxiety, fear, and suspicion within oneself.

  Dalai Lama

  Running, Pain, Thinking

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• So long as space remains
  So long as sentient beings'
  Suffering remains
  I will remain
  In order to help,
  In order to serve.

  Dalai Lama

  Compassion, Order, Space

  Dalai Lama (2016). “The Dalai Lama's Big Book of Happiness: How to Live in Freedom, Compassion, and Love”, p.18, Hampton Roads Publishing

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• Now, if anything at all can be known to be wrong, it seems to me to be unshakably certain that it would be wrong to make any sentient being suffer eternally for any offence whatever.

  Antony Flew

  Fear, Suffering, Atheism

  Antony Flew (1984). “God, freedom, and immortality: a critical analysis”

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• The misery we inflict on sentient beings slackens our human evolution.

  Annie Besant

  Compassion, Misery, Evolution

  Annie Besant (1913). “Vegetarianism in the Light of Theosophy”

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• When you open the door and invite in all sentient beings as your guests, you have to drop your agenda.

  Pema Chodron

  Freedom, Doors, Inspire

  Pema Chodron (2001). “Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living”, p.183, Shambhala Publications

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• The context of the general teachings is one of talking to a sentient being who is experiencing uninterrupted bewilderment – one thought or emotion after another like the surface of the ocean in turmoil, without any recognition of mind essence. This confusion is continuous, without almost any break, life after life.

  Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche

  Ocean, Teaching, Talking

  Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, Erik Pema Kunsang, Marcia Binder Schmidt (1994). “As It Is”, p.82, Rangjung Yeshe Publications

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• To feel overflowing love and almost unbearable compassion for all living creatures is the best way to fulfil the wishes of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Even if for the moment you cannot actually help a sentient being in an external way, meditate on love and compassion constantly over the months and years until compassion is knit inseparably into the very fabric of your mind.

  Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

  Compassion, Years, Mind

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• The true miracle lies in our eagerness to allow, appreciate, and honor the uniqueness, and freedom of each sentient being to sing the song of their heart.

  Amit Ray

  Song, Lying, Yoga

  Amit Ray (2010). “Meditation: Insights and Inspiration”, p.110, INNER LIGHT PUBLISHERS

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• Just as a chariot is verbalized, in dependence on collections of parts, so conventionally a sentient being, is set up depending on the mental and physical aggregates

  Gautama Buddha

  Inspiration, Chariots, Collections

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• We should have a bond of sympathy for all sentient beings, knowing that only the depraved and base take pleasure in the sight of blood and suffering.

  Seneca the Younger

  Life, Sight, Blood

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• Should we find a second form of life right here on our doorstep, we could be confident that life is a truly cosmic phenomenon. If so, there may well be sentient beings somewhere in the galaxy wondering, as do we, if they are not alone in the universe.

  Paul Davies

  May, Wonder, Life Is

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• If you see the intersection of time and space, you experience complete freedom of being. This state of existence is completely beyond any idea of time, space, or being. In that liberated state you can see fundamental truth and the phenomenal world simultaneously. That is called Buddha's world. That is the place where all sentient beings exist, so you can stand up there and see all beings, myriad beings. Then you know very clearly, through your own emotional and intellectual understanding, how all beings exist.

  Dainin Katagiri

  Emotional, Ideas, Space

  Dainin Katagiri (2008). “Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen and the Way of Being Time”, p.75, Shambhala Publications

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• Unceasing change turns the wheel of life, and so reality is shown in all it's many forms. Dwell peacefully as change itself liberates all suffering sentient beings and brings them great joy.

  Amartya Sen

  Reality, Joy, Suffering

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• As you embrace the present and become one with it, and merge with it, you will experience a fire, a glow, a sparkle of ecstasy throbbing in every sentient being. As you begin to experience this exultation of spirit in everything that is alive, as you become intimate with it, joy will be born within you, and you will drop the terrible burdens of defensiveness, resentment, and hurtfulness... then you will become lighthearted, carefree, joyous, and free.

  Deepak Chopra

  Motivational, Spiritual, Anger

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• Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the mystery and tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar face- even my own- become ghostly, unreal, enigmatic. I get into an attitude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism, in a world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain themselves. The discovery of how I am situated- a sentient being on a globe in space overshadows me. I wish I were just nothing.

  W.N.P. Barbellion

  Attitude, Thinking, Space

  W. N. P. Barbellion (1919). “The Journal of a Disappointed Man”

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• It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Compassion, Vegetarianism, Should Have

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sir John Courtown Edward Shelley-Rolls (bart.), Roger Ingpen (1934). “Verse and prose from the manuscripts of Percy Bysshe Shelley”

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• Veganism is about nonviolence. It is about not engaging in harm to other sentient beings; to oneself; and to the environment upon which all beings depend for life. In my view, the animal rights movement is, at its core, a movement about ending violence to all sentient beings. It is a movement that seeks fundamental justice for all. It is an emerging peace movement that does not stop at the arbitrary line that separates humans from nonhumans.

  Gary L. Francione

  Peace, Animal, Rights

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• The idea that we have the right to inflict suffering and death on other sentient beings for the trivial reasons of palate pleasure and fashion is, without doubt, one of the most arrogant and morally repugnant notions in the history of human thought.

  Gary L. Francione

  Death, Fashion, Ideas

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• We are vegans not simply because being vegan will reduce suffering. We are vegan because every sentient being values her or his life even if no one else does. We are vegan because justice minimally requires that we not take life for trivial purposes.

  Gary L. Francione

  Justice, Suffering, Doe

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• All sentient beings have the seed of the Buddha within them.

  Dalai Lama

  Spiritual, Seeds

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