"Nirvana" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... added that the contrast of an earlier mazurka—in the slowness of which the pair had time to look at each other, feel each other, and otherwise remain in Paradise, but outside of the double Nirvana—is highly creditable. But I hope they waltzed to the mazurka. It is rather annoying to other people who are doing the orthodox step; but it is the perfection of the slow movement, which affords, as above, opportunities that do not exist in the faster ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... future life? Surely 'tis not the priest of Reigan who speaks; nor Iemon." She could only see his lips move as he stood at the amado. "Evil was the connection between O'Iwa and this Iemon. Wander not as one unburied, but becoming a Buddha at once enter Nirvana. Namu Myo[u]ho[u] Renge Kyo[u]! Namu Myo[u]ho[u] Renge Kyo[u]! Wonderful the Law, wondrous the Scripture of the Lotus!" With the invocation he cast the stunned reptile far out into the garden. Returning, he said—"The aodaisho[u] ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... buoy, with its flaming torch, had drifted far to leeward, and the 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 his fate. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... noonday stillness; above, the wind-hover hangs motionless, a black dot on the blue. Prone on his back on the springy turf, gazing up into the sky, his fleshy integument seems to drop away, and the spirit ranges at will among the tranquil clouds. This way Nirvana nearest lies. Earth no longer obtrudes herself; possibly somewhere a thousand miles or so below him the thing still "spins like a fretful midge.'' The Loafer knows not nor cares. His is now an astral body, and through ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... 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 end enough ...
— 'Hell fer Sartain' and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... worship her! For first she asked me of my faith and listened eagerly as I expounded it, hoping that the light would come into her heart; then, after I had finished she said—"'So your Path is Renunciation and your Nirvana a most excellent Nothingness which some would think it scarce worth while to strive so hard to reach. Now I will show you a more joyous way and a goddess ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... which Wagner's Tristan is supposed to set forth is that of Schopenhauer. But Schopenhauer's doctrine of Negation of Will or Nirvana—for it is identical with that of Buddhism—is a negation of existence itself absolutely. The man who puts an end to his own life does not attain Nirvana; he is not dissatisfied with life in itself, but only with its conditions, and he passes through the endless cycle of Samsara until ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... "The confusion of your religion is, it boasts only one God and numberless creeds. Each creed claims superiority. This brings inharmony and causes Christians to snap at each other like a pack of wolves. We have many gods and only one creed. We have knowledge and enlightenment which finally lead to Nirvana." ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... 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 ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... of life. Let us in our literature avoid as much as possible the painful side of human nature and the pains and penalties of human weakness; let us endeavour to depict a state of existence as far as possible approaching the Utopian ideal, though not necessarily the Nirvana of the Buddhists nor the paradise of fools; let us look not downwards into the depths of black despair, but upwards into the starry heavens; let us gaze at the golden evening brightening in the west. Richard Jefferies has taught us that such a literature is possible; and ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... 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
... favourite hymn—by a select company of Sudanese buglers. Every one agreed that General Gordon had been avenged at last. Who could doubt it? General Gordon himself, possibly, fluttering, in some remote Nirvana, the pages of a phantasmal Bible, might have ventured on a satirical remark. But General Gordon had always been a contradictious person—even a little off his head, perhaps, though a hero; and besides, he was ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... at the best, are so insignificant and so innumerable that they may well regard them with contempt, and suffer their torments with indifference. But the man of whose spiky bracelet we read was not in search of Nirvana's annihilation, nor had he ever prayed in nakedness beside the Ganges. Cardinal Vaughan, Archbishop of Westminster, was as little like a starveling Sanyasi as any biped descendant of the anthropoids could possibly be. A noticeable man, singularly handsome, of conspicuous, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... justification; and in a last analysis philosophies and theologies offer us only the life more abundantly which the great Teacher said he came into the world to bring. Buddhism offers us eternal peaceful existence in Nirvana; Epicureanism offers pleasure, which is but an intensification of life; Stoicism offers us life freed from disturbing forces; and the great lure which Christianity has always held before humanity is life eternal. Life ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... the presiding genius of my culinary department, as she could not give us the bounteous feast she knew was expected on such occasions. I, as usual, when there was any lack in the viands, tried to be as brilliant as possible in conversation; discussing Nirvana, Karma, reincarnation, and thus turning attention from the evanescent things of earth to the joys of a life to come,—not an easy feat to perform with strong-minded women,—but, in parting, they seemed happy and refreshed, and all promised to ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... on tiptoe with his candle past his closed door, Lawford sat leaning on his arms at the open window, staring out across the motionless moonlit trees that seemed to stand like draped and dreaming pilgrims, come to the peace of their Nirvana at last beside the crashing music of the waters. And he himself, the self that never sleeps beneath the tides and waves of consciousness, was listening, too, almost as unmovedly and unheedingly to the thoughts that clashed in conflict through ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... believers 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 ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... is mental activity trying to find out, but it is confession of ignorance. The bees, the theologians, the dogmatic scientists are the intellectual aristocrats. The rest of us are plebeians, not yet graduated to Nirvana, or to the instinctive and suave as differentiated ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... 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 ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... Tokyo, so far west that the setting sun no longer seems to lose itself among the mountains, but plunges for good and all straight into the shining Nirvana of the sea, a strangely shaped promontory makes out from the land. It is the province of Noto, standing ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... 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 his ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... is that it may be submerged without reserve in the infinite ocean of God." Nothing could be more definite; nor, it must be confessed, more utterly hopeless. To be "submerged without reserve" is to cease from even the illusion of individuality; it is absorption, Nirvana. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... 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 was of ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... 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
... 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 ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... 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
... so much of her face with it, in consequence of the presence of the Rajah Moussa, that I only rarely got a glimpse of the magnificent diamond solitaires in her ears. Our conversation was not brilliant, and the Sultana looked to me as if she had attained nirvana, and had "neither ideas nor the consciousness of the absence of ideas." We returned and took leave of the Sultan, and after we left I caught a glimpse of him lounging at ease in a white shirt and red sarong, all ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... goes through the prosecution before the Patent Office and possibly before the courts shouting high praises of the invention, but all the tribunals turn a deaf ear. Sometimes the attorney finally reaches Nirvana; the invention comes into its own. It shakes the world, just as the attorney had always known ...
— The Professional Approach • Charles Leonard Harness
... out as the ultimate of hope the state of Nirvana, in which existence is not, where the soul is "blown out" like the flame ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... heard—it is Osaka, singing without. The melody is the melody of Turridu's Siciliano, but the words are a promise of a blissful, kissful death and thereafter life everlasting. The puppet dies and with Jor dances off into Nirvana. Now three geishas, representing Beauty, Death, and the Vampire, begin a dance. Kyoto distracts the attention of the spectators while the dancers flaunt their skirts higher and wider until their folds conceal Iris, and Osaka's hirelings seize her ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... worship at pagan shrine; Or, prophet of Islam, e'en at thine; To seek Nirvana in Buddhist lore, Or pray to Isis on Afric's shore; Better the dark, mysterious rites Of Ceres on Elusian heights; Better the Gueber's fierce God of fire— Oh, better to wake the trembling lyre To any Savior than to be hurled Godless and hopeless ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... single tongue uncoiled for drinking. Only 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 now ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... even suggests (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 novel, Hypatia, and by his lectures ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... Harriet answered. "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 ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... she watches the 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 ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... resigns himself wholly to pain and suffering as to "ills that flow from foregone wrongfulness" and asks for no clue from the Silence which can utter naught, he is truly blessed and released from all misery forever. He glides "lifeless to nameless quiet, nameless joy, blessed Nirvana." ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... but this obliges 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 in their accurate spelling (Ramayana, ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... path of immortality (Nirvana), thoughtlessness the path of death. Those who are in earnest do not die, those who are thoughtless are ...
— The Dhammapada • Unknown
... over the lowest and wildest forms of human brotherhood. That's my idea, Ranny. I'm an optimist. I believe that every invention we make, that every step we take in the advancement of science, of mental and physical uplift, brings us just so much nearer to the Nirvana of universal love. This trip of mine among your wild people of the North will give me a good picture of what ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... These are right, justice, truth, 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! ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... inlaid with all kinds of precious stones. It is made of sandalwood and is very handsome. The temple contains a Buddha's tooth and other relics. This must certainly be the place where Shakyamuni entered Nirvana."—H.C.] Osorio, also, in his history of Emanuel of Portugal, says: "Not far from it (the Peak) people go to see a small temple in which are two sepulchres, which are the objects of an extraordinary degree of superstitious devotion. For they believe ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... 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; abrogate &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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 all ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... 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 ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... read so much about agnostic Buddhism, and about Nirvana meaning annihilation, it may seem bold in me to present Buddha as an undoubting believer in the fundamental truths of all religion, and as not only a believer in a spiritual world but an actual visitor to its sad and blissful scenes; but the only agnosticism I have been able to trace to Buddha ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... 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
... come out! Daddy darling, you must! Daddy come 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 ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... terms. A round of the supper places, proposed by the Englishman, was assented to by Mr. Coulson with enthusiasm. About three o'clock in the morning Mr. Coulson had the appearance of a man for whom the troubles of this world are over, and who was realizing the ecstatic bliss of a temporary Nirvana. Mr. Gaynsforth, on the other hand, although half an hour ago he had been boisterous and unsteady, seemed suddenly to have become once more the quiet, discreet-looking young Englishman who had first ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... itself away into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing places must be stepping itself still. Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves? Isn't there any Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments that have fallen into the dust of wormwood but that yet had frail, tremulous, ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... those mentioned in the Book of the Revelation by preference as imparting a fine scriptural flavor to the dea. And he sat upon the throne day and night, looking down upon the earth, and never did anything else nor felt it monotonous. Buddha himself, in Nirvana, could not have attained to a greater perfection of contemplation than that with which they credited this curious divinity, who served solely for a finish to their mental range as the sky was to their visual; a useful point at which to aim their ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... 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 his activities transformed ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... under any circumstances—if you arrive at a state of Nirvana before death. ... Gay life this, my boy! I've been so wicked and fast and devilish and hoggish and gluttonous and always rotten and riotous that I needs must spend a few months in this agony by way of preliminary atonement before I may get even ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... everything, and there was 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 a region of ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... 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
... pantheist; of Schlegel, who gave to his country the enchanted realm of Shakespeare—of the sublime Kant, author of the first work published in Germany on Pure Reason; of Fichte, the infinite idealist; of Schopenhauer, the European Buddhist who followed the great Gautama to the painless and dreamless Nirvana, and of hundreds of others whose names are familiar to and honored ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... 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 invented a system of expiatory punishments which, known ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... Dana is the name for religious charity, the first of the six paramitas, or means of attaining to nirvana; and a danapati is "one who practises dana and thereby crosses the sea ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... street, that sat with him by his fireless hearth, that lay beside him all night, a loathsome bedfellow, telling him a shameful, hopeless tale, and driving the blessed sleep away from him. There were times when he envied his neighbour her nirvana of gin and water; times when the gross steam of the stew prepared for the man below awoke in him acute, intolerable emotion; times when the spiritual will that dominated him, so far from being purified by abstinence, ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... legs. After countless ages spent on earth seeking the true source of happiness men were still countless ages from agreement. One half sought by goodness to attain happiness in immortality; the other in Nirvana. One half found the shadow of happiness in inertia, in stupefaction, a mere satisfying of physical needs; the other in motion, joining in the mad procession which we call so boastfully Progress. By accident of ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... reflect how weak man's imagination is when it comes to deal with what is beyond him, how little able he is to devise anything that he desires to do when he has escaped from life. The unsubstantial heaven of a Buddhist, with its unthinkable Nirvana, is merely the depriving life of all its attributes; the dull sensuality of the Mohammedan paradise, with its ugly multiplication of gross delights; the tedious outcries of the saints in light which make the medieval scheme of heaven into one protracted canticle—these ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... NIRVANA, n. In the Buddhist religion, a state of pleasurable annihilation awarded to the wise, particularly to those wise ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... On the other hand, Nirvana is the word which holds condensed the whole realm of Buddha's ideals. It is not my purpose to discuss the original meaning of this word. I gladly concede that it meant a state of moral achievement when the powers of the soul were at equilibrium and when resultant peace pervaded the ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... whether 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, ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... either fortune had tasted our cup of triumph, 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
... a place for dreams and quietness. Nothing else seems worth the having. Let us feel no more the fever of life. Surely they are the wise who seek Nirvana; who insist not upon themselves, but wait absorption —reabsorption—into the infinite. The dead have the better part. I think of the stirring, adventurous man who built these walls and dug these canals. His life was full of action, full of journeyings ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... pious drops the closing eye requires;" but who, seated in an iron chair beneath the miniature pagoda erected in most large temples for that purpose, passes away in fire and smoke from this vale of tears and sin to be absorbed in the blissful nothingness of an eternal Nirvana. ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... great, thick slice. He knew she could never eat it, and she knew she could never eat it. But she did eat it all, ecstatically. And in a sort of ecstatic Nirvana the quiet and vastness and peace of the big old frame house settled down ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... religious feeling of the day was extremely inclined 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 ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... with a strange language and a strange 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
... life is but one momentary halt upon an infinite journey; that all attachment to persons, to places, or to things must be fraught with sorrow; that only through suppression of every desire—even the desire of Nirvana itself—can humanity reach the eternal peace, certainly harmonized with the older racial feeling. Though the people never much occupied themselves with the profounder philosophy of the foreign faith, ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... inches,(2) and the width of them a little more than six inches. On the sole-part of each footprint there is the impression of a wheel; and upon each of the prints of the ten toes there is a flower-like design, which sometimes radiates light. When the Buddha felt that the time of his Nirvana was approaching, he went to Kushina [Kusinara], and there stood upon that stone. He stood with his face to the south. Then he said to his disciple Anan [Ananda]: 'In this place I leave the impression of my feet, to remain for a last token. Although a king of this country will try to destroy ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... man can want or strive or hope for. Escape from suffering is possible only by cessation from existence; and that cessation from existence, here and hereafter, can be attained by man himself, who can reach Nirvana without the aid of gods, if gods there be. From the point of view of metaphysics the idea that there is any relation between the human personality and the divine falls to the ground, according to the Buddha, because, whether there be gods or not, at any rate there ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... savory, the fire was warm, and relief from two weeks of pain left a sort of Nirvana of peace. Rarely had the duke passed a more delightfully entertaining morning. There was a richness in the Temple Barholm situation, as described in detail by Mrs. Braddle, which filled him with delight. His regret that he was not a writing person intensified ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ignore the creation as the Mystics would. Although created out of nothing, that is, through and out of God, he cannot of his own power resolve himself back into this nothingness. The self-annihilation of which Tauler so often speaks is scarcely better than the sinking away of the human soul in Nirvana, as the Buddhists have it. Thus Tauler says: 'That if he by greater reverence and love could reach the highest existence in non-existence, he would willingly sink from his height into the deepest abyss.' But this ...
— Memories • Max Muller
... to 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 near to the empty packing-cases. ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... 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 ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... evidence afforded by them that, without great increase of optical power, no further Neptunian or Uranian satellites can be perceived, and the consequent relegation of Herschel's baffling quartette, notwithstanding the unquestioned place long assigned to them in astronomical text-books, to the Nirvana of non-existence. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... Hitchcock. It takes emphatically the point of view of the "non-existence of a second." Multiplicity is appearance; the difference between the individual soul and the All Soul depends upon an error which we can overcome. The goal of salvation is the ascent into the universal spirit Brahma (in the nirvana of the Buddhists there is the same thought). Whoever has entered into the highest spirit, there is no longer any "other" for him. Brhadaranyaka-Upanishad, IV, 3: (23) "If he does not then [The man in the deep sleep (susupti),] ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... have made a book or two in my time, and I am making another that perhaps will see the light one of these days. But if I had my life to live over again, I think I should go in for silence, and get as near to Nirvana as I could. This language is such a paltry tool! The handle of it cuts and the blade doesn't. You muddle yourself by not knowing what you mean by a word, and send out your unanswered riddles and rebuses to clear up ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... wanderings and passes into the body of a boy. When the boy is found he becomes the Dalai Lama of Lhasa. Lamaists believe, then, in the transmigration of souls, and the end, the fullest perfection, is peace in Nirvana. ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... 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 ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... 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
... to communicate directly with Nature, and become as much greater than the present race 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 everlasting ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... surprise, when I glanced at my right-hand neighbour I saw that she was fast asleep, and when I glanced at the one on my left I saw that she was asleep too. I looked about at other people, and saw more than one sunk in a pious Nirvana. As we left the church I asked the Englishwoman, who had a strong sense of humour, whether she had slept well. 'Yes,' she said, laughing, 'it did me a lot of good.' 'But why do you go?' I said. 'Oh, my dear,' said she, 'what can one do? It ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... fig. 2) was long attributed to him, but is now thought to be of later date, like the two landscapes well known under his name in Japan. Wu Taotzue seems to have given supreme expression to the central subject of Buddhist art, the Nirvana of Buddha, who lies serenely asleep, with all creation, from saints and kings to birds and beasts, passionately bewailing him. The composition is known from Japanese copies; and it is in fact from the early religious schools of Japan that ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... both mental and physical: he experiences it himself, he inflicts it upon others; (ii) that this suffering is occasioned by desire; (iii) that the condition of suffering in which man finds himself admits of amelioration and relief; (iv) the way of release, and the attainment to Nirvana. ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... the Nirvana of the Hindu, the Heaven of the Christian are natural hopes of beings whose cares and disappointments here are softened by belief that somewhere, Thor, Brahma or God ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 I won spirit, and through spirit, peace. ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... well—I wonder! I wonder what will be the end! I wonder why we came into life at all—I wonder why we go! Fortunately for me, by and by, there will be an end of all wondering, and you can write above my tomb, 'Implora pace'! The idea of commencing a new life is to me, horrible,—I prefer 'Nirvana' or nothingness. Never have I read truer ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... hitchhiking across the country, to try to get away from himself... Somewhere the test instruments—which had seemed so lenient—had tripped him up, spotting the weakness that he had tried to fight. Temper, nerves—emotional instability. So there was no green card for Tif, to whom space was a kind of Nirvana... ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... 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 ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... 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 sense of rest we are ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... change—that is, "immortal"—just as the unavailable heat of the physicist is "immortal," and not capable of further transformation? Here we are again in the fog of illogic, beyond the limitations. However, it sounds familiar to the Nirvana of the Buddhist. ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... in what district of the Tula province have you bought your estate? For the first two years after buying an estate one has a hard time, at moments it is very bad indeed, but by degrees one is led to Nirvana, by sweet habit. I bought an estate and mortgaged it, I had a very hard time the first years (famine, cholera). Afterwards everything went well, and now it is pleasant to remember that I have somewhere near the Oka a nook of ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... perhaps the hardest to make and, at the same time, the most important from the standpoint of health and working-power, is the decision not to care too much about the objects we are seeking to achieve. We need not subscribe to the Nirvana philosophy. A certain intensity of desire is normal, but modern life tends to a morbid frenzied intensity. Most of us need, in the interest of mental health or sanity, to moderate our desires. A business man who ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... throne. Active, daring, and astute, he 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, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of the blankness, out of the silence Emerges on soundless wings! The long sweet-sloping Rise and fall of far viol notes,— The mad Nirvana, The faint and spectral ...
— Spectra - A Book of Poetic Experiments • Arthur Ficke
... footing in China; only 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
... statement of the doctrine of transmigration. The climax of the transmigrations is Nirvana or extinction of the individual soul, according to the Buddhist, and union with or absorption into Deity, according to the Hindu.[111] Buddhism has gone from the land of its birth, as Christianity and even Judaism from Palestine, and I pass from the Buddhist doctrine. The Hindu climax, ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... never to prepare food for myself if it is possible to get some one else to do it. A complete inertia is a vital step toward Nirvana." ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... Very early, on account of my skill in translation, I was called to China, and there put to rendering the Thirty-five Discourses of the father of the Budhisattwa into Chinese and Thibettan. I also published a version of the Lotus of the Good Law, and another of the Nirvana. These brought me a great honor. To an ancestor of mine, Maha Kashiapa, Buddha happened to have intrusted his innermost mysteries—that is, he made him Keeper of the Pure Secret of the Eye of Right Doctrine. Behold the symbol ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... driving and music-loving Mr. Pike. Many a haler remnant than he had gone down on a last voyage. As for Captain West, he did not count. He was too neutral a being, too far away, a sort of favoured passenger who had nothing to do but serenely and passively exist in some Nirvana of his own creating. ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... for that carrion there!" he accused me. He jerked down a section of white curtain and whirled it over the stiffening body. "If you must grieve, grieve for Miss Nefer! Exiled, imprisoned, locked forever in the past, her mind pulsing faintly in the black hole of the dead and gone, yearning for Nirvana yet nursing one lone painful patch of consciousness. And only to hold a fort! Only to make sure Mary Stuart is executed, the Armada licked, and that all the other consequences flow on. The Snakes' Elizabeth let Mary live ... and England die ... and the Spaniard hold North America to the ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... she looked away with a flutter of her lashes, as if she were shamed at having allowed herself to be caught in open admiration of him. "Look! The last effulgence of rose!" she went on hurriedly about the sunset. "Why shouldn't we think of the sky as heaven, as Nirvana? What better immortality than ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... aspires to higher things and tortures his flesh, it may go better with him in another life. For he must be born again many times, and must torture his body until it shrivels up, is freed from sin, and is without desires. Then the soul is released and is not born again, for Nirvana, the last goal, is reached. Only bad men continue to live. The nations of India had been demoralised by that doctrine for centuries. But it did not satisfy wise men. Balthasar thought: If a man starves ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... of the futility of human effort, that there is neither bad work nor good work to do, nothing but to await the coming of the Nirvana. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore |
