I'm so blessed to have such enlightened parents. It must have been very hard to watch their able-bodied son lock himself up in his old room for most of his 20s.
I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless.
There is an ideal of excellence for any particular craft or occupation; similarly there must be an excellent that we can achieve as human beings. That is, we can live our lives as a whole in such a way that they can be judged not just as excellent in this respect or in that occupation, but as excellent, period. Only when we develop our truly human capacities sufficiently to achieve this human excellent will we have lives blessed with happiness.
Perfection is the exclusive attribute of God, and it is indescribable, untranslatable. I do believe that it is possible for human beings to become perfect, even as God is perfect. It is necessary for all of us to aspire after that perfection but when that blessed state is attained, it become indescribable, indefinable.
Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts twenty minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces.
There are those who struggle every day with challenges. Let us extend to them our concern, as well as a helping hand. As we care for each other, we will be blessed.
I have been blessed by having, and I admittedly am biased, some of the smartest, hardest-working, and good people in my administration that I think any president has ever had.
Education equals choices. I have been blessed with the choice to be anything I ever wanted to be, and I truly owe my happiness to my family and education.
When I have come to you, at last (as I have always done), I have come to peace and happiness. I come home, now, like a tired traveller, and find such a blessed sense of rest!
Abu Dharr once described the people of the world, says, "They breed what will they ultimately bury, they build what will eventually be destroy, they hold firm to what is emphemeral, and they forsake what is everlasting. Hence, blessed are the two cries people abominate most: Death and poverty.
Our blessed radio. It gives us eyes and ears out into the world. We listen to the German station only for good music. And we listen to the BBC for hope.
Friendship exists outside our modern economy of scarcity... It's not about apportioning vanishing resources of time and energy. Friendship is a blessed relic of the ancient economy of the gift, and the time freely given to people dear to you actually creates magical abundance.
The way to deeper knowledge of God is through the lonely valleys of soul poverty and abnegation of all things. The blessed ones who possess the Kingdom are they who have repudiated every external thing and have rooted from their hearts all sense of possessing. These are the 'poor in spirit.'
Without approval and without scorn, but carefully studying the sentences word by word, one should trace them in the Discourses and verify them by the Discipline. If they are neither traceable in the Discourses nor verifiable by the Discipline, one must conclude thus: 'Certainly, this is not the Blessed One's utterance; this has been misunderstood by that bhikkhu - or by that community, or by those elders, or by that elder.' In that way, bhikkhus, you should reject it.