"Nirvana" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... speculations of neo-pythagorism and neo-platonism viewed this world, which had once appeared to it so joyous and radiant, as an abode of darkness and error, and earthly existence as a period of trial which could never be too quickly traversed." Nirvana ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... if you would have a dream or a nightmare, a horror or 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 ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... 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 ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... to 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 ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the East. The normal man has a more materialistic consciousness. But having lost that, your very spirit has dissolved into these strange illuminations which you call thought, but which I fear are only the ghostly rays of a Nirvana intelligence. With you life is but a breath without form, a whisper out of your long eternity. And I confess that to me the impression of a man not being at home in his own body is nothing ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... 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
... 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 ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin
... He 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 ...
— The Professional Approach • Charles Leonard Harness
... The Schopenhauers, the Hartmanns, and all the Buddhists, say that the greatest happiness is Nirvana, Non-Life; and they are right in this sense,—that human happiness is coincident with the annihilation of 'Self.' Only they do not express themselves well. They say that Humanity should annihilate itself to avoid its sufferings, that ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... 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
... be set over against other passages, easily to be cited, in which Schleiermacher speaks of passivity and contemplation as the means of the realisation of the unity of man and God, as if the elimination of self meant a sort of Nirvana. Schleiermacher was a pantheist and mystic. No philosopher save Kant ever influenced him half so much as did Spinoza. There is something almost oriental in his mood at times. An occasional fragment of description of religion might pass as a better ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... 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 been Rome was a black waste ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Him, 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" ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... 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 and ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... universe. So 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 ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... utterly holy, utterly pure; nothing can desecrate this holiness or stain this purity; he is no longer of the earth, its concerns are matters foreign to him, its pains and griefs and troubles cannot reach him. When he dies, Nirvana is his; he will be absorbed into the substance of the Supreme Deity and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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
... 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 of misery." It is given as "a title of honour to all who support the cause of Buddhism by acts of charity, especially to founders and patrons of monasteries;"—see Eitel, ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... green 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
... discarnate status—an order, that is, of 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 ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... better 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 ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... stir; he sat with his hands clasped about his knees, and contemplated space with the abstract look of a Buddha gazing into Nirvana. ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... 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. ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... stars; The Power that still establishes on earth Desire and worship, through the radiant laws Of Duty, Love and Beauty; for through these As through three portals of the self-same gate The soul of man attains infinity, And enters into Godhead. So he gained On earth a fore-taste of Nirvana, not The void of eastern dream, but the desire And goal of all of us, whether thro' lives Innumerable, by slow degrees, we near The death divine, or from this breaking body Of earthly death we flash at once to God. Through simple ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... 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, ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... 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
... a 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, but ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... being 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
... hundred thirty days yet and it is finished; then . . . Nirvana! How wearied I am with sorrow, woe ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... 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 which sunk in Omi ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... 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 ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... illuminates all creations.... There is no place in the universe where this Body does not prevail. The universe becomes dust; this Body for ever remains. It is free from all opposites and contraries, yet it is working in all things to lead them to Nirvana.' [Footnote: Suzuki, Outlines, ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... Hampstead as in the streets of London that lie at its foot. But such is not the suggestion of Hampstead itself upon a tranquil summer day to the pensive observer. It seems a peaceful, a sleepy hollow, an amiable elevated lubber-land, affording to London the example of a kind of suburban Nirvana. ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... fills one with the same hushed awe as this shrouded, hooded, deeply brooding figure, rigid with contemplation, still with an eternal stillness, her soul rapt from her body on some distant quest. Is she Nirvana? Is she The Peace of God? She has been given many names—her maker would give her none. Her meaning is mystery; she is ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... associated with and evoked by Theism, or the belief in a Divine Father; by Pantheism, as in the case of Spinoza, whose face at the very first glance impresses you with its spiritual cast; or even by the Buddhist belief in Nirvana. It may also be attained by following the precepts and striving after the ideals of Ethical Culture. For spirituality is not indissolubly associated with any one type of religion or philosophy; it is a quality ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... 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 ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... creed is 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
... 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
... 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, was met in silence ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... abstinence, patience, brotherly love, and repentance for sins committed above sacrifice and bodily mortification, and opened to his followers the prospect, after this weary life, no more to be exposed to the ever-recurring pains of new birth, but released from all suffering to return to Nirvana, or nothingness. While Brahminism drew a distinction between man and man, and with hierarchical pride took no thought of the Sudra or lower class of the people, and limited wisdom to the priestly caste, Sakya-muni preached the equality of all men, came forward as a preacher ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... seas of phantasies, Through seas of solitudes and vacancies, And through my Self, the deepest of the seas, I strive to thee, Nirvana. ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... rich, having had much pleasure in the world, have less of it than the poor. After a term of years the Tagbanua dies again and goes at once to a heaven in a deeper cave without danger from fire. Seven times he dies, each time going deeper and becoming happier, and probably gains Nirvana in the end. Occasionally a good spirit returns as a dove, and a bad one comes as a goat; indeed, a few of the bad ones are doomed to wander over the ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... is still the goal to the color-blind and normal alike, whatever they call it, however, they visualize it. That is its only importance; it is The Goal..... In things spiritual the same obtains—whether one's vision embraces Nirvana, or the Algonquin Ocean of Light, or a pallid Christ half hidden in floating clouds—Drene, it is all one, all one. It is not the Goal that changes; only our intelligence concerning its ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 is ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... room for coffee and liqueurs and a talk over old days on the Bear. And the afternoon in that cosy, sunlit cabin, the blessed sensation of rest after toil combined with a luxurious lounge and delicious cigar, constituted as near an approach to "Nirvana" as the writer is ever likely to attain on this side of ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... 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 in the collective whole for ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... had I sincerely wished to be an angel with an undeserved crown weighing down my forehead, and a harp, which I should be totally incompetent to play, within my hand; but now it struck me that there might be a worse sort of Nirvana than driving a 10,000 horsepower car along a broad, straight road free from dogs, chickens, or any other animals (except, perhaps, rich, knighted grocers), and reaching ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... destruction of the human species, the wild mountains of Northern India, now 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 ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... would tend to the preservation of the weak. There can be no question of the grandeur of this conception. To no man is given nobler aspirations than to him who conceives of a just distribution of comfort in an existence not idle, but without struggle. It would be a Nirvana glorious only in the absence of sorrow, but still perhaps a happy ending for our race. It may, after all, be our destiny. Nor can any right-minded man forbear his tribute to the good which Socialistic agitation has done. No man can tell how much misery it has prevented, ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... was in Asia in an unknown antiquity that the Persian Zoroaster taught the dualism of good and evil; that the Indian Gautama 600 years before Christ declared that self-abnegation was the path to a dreamless Nirvana; that less than a century later the Chinese Lao-tse enunciated the mysteries of Taoism and Confucius uttered his maxims regarding the five earthly relations of man, to be followed within another century by the bold teaching of Mencius that kings should rule in ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... may be in the sense that it 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 from the ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... myself and made me at times what is called mad. After being down-hearted for some time, I grow superstitious and imagine that some strange and fatal spell is hanging over us all. Even my own acts and thoughts take on the futility of nightmare, and Nirvana is very welcome, if I could be sure of it, but I had rather stay what I am than start life all over again in some other shape, with a possible creeping recollection of my former existence. I have at times startled intimations that I lived in vain in some former ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... 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 ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... 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 be safely ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... or who are stricken with a mortal disease, are compelled by rule to move into a certain part of their monastery, known as the Abode of a Long Old Age, in which they are required—not to die, for death does not come to a good priest, but—to enter into Nirvana, which is a sublime state of conscious freedom from all mental and physical disturbance, not to be adequately described in words. At death, the priest is placed in a chair, his chin supported by a crutch, and then put into a wooden box, which on the ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... oneself and enter into the Higher Indifference. Beyond this, further meditation and fasting—by which was meant living solely on fish, fruit, wine, and meat—one presently attained to complete Swaraj or Control of Self, and might in time pass into the absolute Nirvana, or the Negation of Emptiness, the supreme goal ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... 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 bowed to Mr. Coulson in the bar of the Grand Hotel and accepted with some diffidence his offer ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... must reap all the consequences of its former life. It must also during its stay on earth make the conditions for its next appearance upon an earthly plane. So soon as through a succession of births and deaths it had perfected itself, it entered into a state of Nirvana. It was absorbed into the great Universal ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... 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 cateleptic tranquillity ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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
... many square spaces which could give shelter, Nikolai, with a certain inborn instinct, had chosen the foremost and most unsuspicious looking one, which stood half built with a sloping plank-roof over it. There he lay wedged into the farthest corner, close wrapped in the happy Nirvana of self-forgetfulness—school zero, and Mrs. Holman a cipher—his body bent down over his knees, his coat pulled up about his neck to keep out the drips, and his boots down in ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... outward good is the breath of its nostrils, the attainment of outward good would seem to be its suffocation and death. Why does the painting of any paradise or Utopia, in heaven or on earth, awaken such yawnings for nirvana and escape? The white-robed harp-playing heaven of our sabbath-schools, and the ladylike tea-table elysium represented in Mr. Spencer's Data of Ethics, as the final consummation of progress, are exactly on a par in this respect,—lubberlands, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... 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
... the poet laughed. "Least irritation, least effort—a compromise of Nirvana and life. Least irritation, least effort, the ideal existence: a jellyfish floating in a tideless, tepid, ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... of calm Nirvana, of quietism's joys? What are they to "Row's" Gospel, the Paradise of Noise? Quakerian calm is obsolete, but oh! who can resist The tow-row, tow-row, tow-row of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... and terrifying proof 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
... how are we to account for the recent violent outbreaks in India, where Anarchism has hardly been born. More than any other old philosophy, Hindu teachings have exalted passive resistance, the drifting of life, the Nirvana, as the highest spiritual ideal. Yet the social unrest in India is daily growing, and has only recently resulted in an act of political violence, the killing of Sir Curzon Wyllie by the Hindu, Madar ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... 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 a relic of Buddha, or a central well where the ashes of priests and princes ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... 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
... the sorrows in a divine peace—a peace that became the reward of all disciples of the religion that he founded. This peace was called by him Nirvana and his disciples say he is the only man who attained it in his lifetime, for Nirvana is supposed to come only to the spirits of the dead, who have purified themselves not in one life, but in many. In Buddha's belief (for as Buddha we shall now know him), human beings ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan's will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite's will is quite equally frozen by his view ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... myself. I was isolated in my own skull. Thoughts presented themselves unbidden; they were not my thoughts, they were plainly some one else's; and I considered them like a part of the landscape. I take it, in short, that I was about as near Nirvana as would be convenient in practical life; and if this be so, I make the Buddhists my sincere compliments; 'tis an agreeable state, not very consistent with mental brilliancy, not exactly profitable in a money point of view, ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... NIRVANA, n. In the Buddhist religion, a state of pleasurable annihilation awarded to the wise, particularly to those wise enough to ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... 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, ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... philosophy 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 ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... lived in solitude, and returned, he was received by the benediction of a virgin, "Blessed is thy mother, blessed is thy father, blessed is the wife to whom thou belongest." But he replied, "Only they are blessed who are in Nirvana," i.e., who have entered the eternal cosmic order. In St. Luke's Gospel (xi. 27), we read: "And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice and said unto him, 'Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.' But ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... 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
... holds 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
... 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 ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... 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 was of ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the Republic The Radiant Christ At Bay The Birth of Jealousy Summer's Farewell The Goal Christ Crucified The Trip to Mars Fiction and Fact Progress How the White Rose Came I look to Science Appreciation The Awakening Most blest is he Nirvana Life Two men Only be still Pardoned Out The Tides Progression Acquaintance Attainment The tower-room Father The ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... 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 ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... higher aim, a greater mission. What is a kingdom? What are wealth and power? What crown and scepter? They are transient things, I yearn for the Immortal state, Nirvana. ...
— The Buddha - A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes • Paul Carus
... themselves in a different light, and glow again with attractive colours. He doubted, and agonized in his doubt; but as the sun set, the religious side of his nature had won the victory, and seems to have come out even purified from the struggle. He had attained to Nirvana, had become clear in his mind, a Buddha, an Enlightened One. From that night he not only did not claim any merit on account of his self-mortification, but took every opportunity of declaring that from such penances no advantage ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... destroyed the complex vision; and if the complex vision is destroyed it seems as though non-existence were bound to take the place of existence, and as though nothingness were bound to take the place of everything. The oriental conception of "Nirvana" is no more than a soothing opiate administered to a soul that has grown weary of its complex vision and weary of its irreducible personality. To imagine oneself freed from the burden of personal consciousness, and yet in some mysterious ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... 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.
... 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 ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cashier of the local trust has compromised an astral body, and has squandered on her all our funds, including a lot of first mortgages on Nirvana. I suppose he's been dabbling in futures and is short in his accounts. I ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... miles were massed myriads of Norlaminians. From their tasks everywhere had come the mental laborers; the Country of Youth had been left depopulated; even those who, their lifework done, had betaken themselves to the placid Nirvana of the Country of Age, returned briefly to the Country of Study to speed upon its way that ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... and hard, and whose bodies, 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, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... soft tissue, packed away in a casket of bone, and made easily portable by a pair of levers called 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 birth we were of the progressive half and we paraded around ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... 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] is the most harmless of snakes. The ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... 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 ...
— 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
... remained of his exquisite faculty of minute sight—with a feeling of great peace; and thought prayerfully; lost himself in a kind of formless prayer without words—lost himself completely. It was as if the wished-for dissolution were coming of its own accord; Nirvana—an ecstasy of conscious annihilation—the blessed end, the end of all! as ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... horn spectacles, "she made me 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
... to celebrate its completion. In the group of the Nations of the East the elephant bears the Indian prince, and within the howdah, the Spirit of the East, mystic and hidden. (p. 63.) On the right is the Buddhist lama from Tibet, representative of that third of the human race which finds hope of Nirvana in countless repetitions of the sacred formula, "Om Mani Padme Hum." Next is the Mohammedan, with the crescent of Islam; then a negro slave, and then a Mongolian warrior, the ancient inhabitant of the sandy waste, a type of those Tartar ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... one patience greater than the endurance of the cat at the hole of the mouse or the wolf which waits for the moose to drop, and that is the patience of the thinking man; the measure of the Hindoo's moveless contemplation of Nirvana is not in hours but in weeks or even in months. Randall Byrne sat at his sentinel post with his hands folded and his grave eyes steadily fixed before him, and for hour after hour he did not move. Though the wind rose, now and again, and whistled through the upper chambers or mourned down ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... the differences which of course exist, and which only a presumptuous form of religion has ventured to treat as transitory or insignificant. Let me use a technical word, and say that it is no pantheistic absorption in an impersonal Light, no Nirvana of union with a vague whole, which the Apostle holds out here, but it is the closest possible union, personality being saved and individual consciousness being intensified. It is the clothing of humanity with so much of that glory as can be imparted to a finite creature. That means perfect ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... the pre-existence of souls, and the old pagan doctrines of the reincarnation of souls, and the final absorption of all into Nirvana. A spirit having answered that all had been asserted in some other form, questions and answers ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... rest of you by the loveliness of the afternoon and the niceness of everybody. Here it is almost eating-time and I haven't even opened the baskets. No, don't you move," she commanded the others, beginning to stir from their nirvana to make dutiful offers of help. "I'll call the children. And Neale will be ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... Out 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
... to read, and read on and on through the exquisite rise and fall of the stanzas, through the beautiful clear high thoughts which seem to come as a breath and a breeze from an unattainable heaven, from the Nirvana we all hope for in our inmost hearts, whatever our confession of faith. And the poor girl was soothed, and touched and lulled by the music of thought and the sigh of verse that is in the poem; and the morning passed. I suppose the quiet and the poetry ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... 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
... (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 ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... 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 ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... arch of the trees, where luminous insects, white and flame-colored butterflies, aimlessly chased one another, Marsa half slumbered in a sort of voluptuous oblivion, a happy calm, in that species of nirvana which the open air of summer brings. She felt herself far away from the entire world in that corner of verdure, and abandoned herself to childish hopes and dreams, in profound enjoyment of ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... the man. Kubin's favourite authors for years were Schopenhauer and Mainlaender, the latter a disciple of the mighty Arthur and one who put into practice a tenet of his master, for he attained Nirvana by ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the mud, the heart of the mud—Oh, for oblivion! Nirvana—'The Dewdrop slips into the shining sea'—We're slipping into the courtyard of the castle. How many weary women, women waiting, happy women, despairing women, thoughtful women, thoughtless women, have those rows of winking windows eyed as they entered? Women are much more interesting than ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... priest bowed himself, and prayed in a low, chanting voice. The face of the Lord Buddha behind the rails was lighted by the wind-blown flame of many tapers, so that it almost looked as though he smiled out of his far-away Nirvana upon his kneeling worshippers, who could ask nothing of him, not even mercy, since the salvation of a man is in ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... preparations for dinner. This completely upset 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 ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... rootless Root. Souls are born and develop in "Abred," passing into the different kingdoms; "Amwn" is the state through which beings pass only once, which means that the "I," when once gained, continues for ever. "Gwynvyd" is the world of perfect and liberated souls, eternal Heaven, great Nirvana. ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... recover partially—not wholly 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 ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... steak—a 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 ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... call this Objective Concentration. Concentration "within" implies the withdrawing of attention from the external world and the placing of mind on "God," "Spirit," "Heaven," "Religion," "Peace," "Nirvana," "Eternity," etc. This is Involution, i.e., incoming or ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... inexistence^; nonexistence, nonsubsistence; nonentity, nil; 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, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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 ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... fought against it for the sake of decorum. To my 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 has ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... lust Of life passed from me; so the narrow I Merged in the infinite, from hope set free— Heritor of Nirvana's holy calm, Wherein the voices of the heart's unrest Are stifled, and the soul expands to clasp Joy, nothingness, eternity ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke |
