Quotations Search Results
We found 673 matching quotes
Muhammad , Essential Sufism
True wealth is not abundance in property but a generous heart.
True wealth is not abundance in property
Giving to Those Who Need the Most
Practice concentric visualizations, from the nearest to the neediest. Here is an exercise you can do anytime.
Close your eyes and visualize yourself giving a generous smile to the person in your life you love most. Now open your eyes. How do you feel? Imagine that person smiling back and laughing with you.
Next, close your eyes and visualize yourself giving a generous smile to someone who is just an acquaintance, and feel that same response and laughter.
Finally, close your eyes and visualize yourself giving a generous smile to someone who you think is really in need of help, and feel that response and laughter. Then, imagine how you can help that person, and go out and do it.
A visualization for giving generously.
Keep the Gift in Motion
“Follow through on all your generous impulses.” –Epictetus
Designate a day as “giving away” day. Pack up all the clothes you no longer wear. Clean your cupboards of all the pots, pans, utensils, and dishes that you don’t use. Do the same for the closets where you store the debris from your life – the kids’ old toys or the lamp you swore you needed but could never find a place for. Pack it all in bags and take it to your favorite charity. (I like to donate things to the battered women’s shelter in my town rather than to a thrift store because the women receive the things for free.)
As you go through the process, notice your train of thought. What objects are you willing to let go of? Which ones must you keep? What thoughts go through your mind as you sort? Do you hold onto somethings, believing that you will need them later even though you haven’t used it yet in ten years? Do you think it’s too good to give away even though you don’t really want it? Do your possessions make you feel safe?
Encouragement to give away what you don't need.
Secret Acts of Kindness
Rabbi Nota Tzvi Frankel, the Alter ([Wise] Old Man) of the Slobodka Yeshiva, taught, "Do only good, for that is why you were created. But who needs to know about it?" In line with this teaching, we should try to do some act of kindness on a routine basis that remains unknown to others. We should let it remain a secret between us, the recipient of our kindness (if it is an act that cannot be done anonymously), and God.
Not needing to be recognized for good acts.
Nine Queens
Greed makes suckers out of us all. In communities all around the world, swindlers, pickpockets, shoplifters, and all types of scoundrels prey upon ordinary people and business establishments. These tricksters work the streets duping those who are always looking for something more and taking advantage of the generosity of those who genuinely care about other people.
In this fast-paced and very suspenseful thriller, the setting is a large city in Argentina. Juan (Gaton Pauls) is in the midst of a bill-changing scheme in a delicatessen when he’s spotted by Marcos (Ricardo Darin), a veteran con man. He wants to hand on some of the tricks of the trade to this rookie. Juan’s former teacher, his father, is in prison.
Marcos wants the younger man to join him in a big score. It involves the sale and resale of some priceless printed stamps — the Nine Queens — from the Weimar Republic. The target is Gandolfo (Ignasi Abadal), a wealthy businessman and wheeler-dealer who collects stamps.
Marcus has done all the spade work for the swindle — getting the forgeries and involving his sister Valeria (Leticia Bredice), who works at the hotel where Gandolfo is staying. Her feud with Marcos over his cheating her and another brother, Federico (TomasFonzi), out of a family inheritance adds a little spice to the proceedings.
Writer and director Fabián Bielinsky has crafted a top-notch suspense story that contains as many twists and reversals as a David Mamet creation. In a world where everyone is out to get something for nothing, no one is very trustworthy. Especially those who pretend to be naïve. Nine Queens is a very entertaining film about the shadow side of play.
A very entertaining film about the shadow side of play.
Hideous Kinky
Adventure is good for the soul of both children and adults; it gives them a chance to test their wings and determine their values. In 1972 Julie (Kate Winslett), a free-spirited single mother, leaves London and her poet boyfriend and heads off for Marrakech with six-year-old Lucy (Carrie Mullan) and eight-year-old Bea (Bella Riza). The exotic city is awash with new sights and tantalizing possibilities. While Julie tries to support her family by selling handmaid dolls, the prostitutes at the hotel where she lives steal her clothing from the laundry.
Her spirits perk up when she meets Bilal (Said Taghmaoui), a street acrobat. He becomes her lover and surrogate father to her two young daughters. When their money runs out, he takes them to his remote mountain village, but the elders harass him about his neglected wife who lives there. Returning to Marrakech, Julie and her daughters are taken in by Santoni (Pierre Clementi), a European with a spacious villa. There Bea, who wants a more normal life, gets what she desires. Julie visits a Sufi master in Algiers who gives her something quite different from what she expects. And Bilal eventually returns into their lives with the ultimate act of selfless love and generosity.
Based on a book by Esther Freud, which has been adapted for the screen by Billie MacKinnon, Hideous Kinky (the term refers to a word game played by the girls) is a cross-cultural gem that is spiked with superb performances, colorful characters, and one of the great closing sequences in recent memory. For all of the characters, adventure is a great teacher bestowing extravagant gifts memorable enough to last a lifetime. Gillies MacKinnon (Small Faces, Trojan Eddie) directs this sense-luscious drama with great flair.
A cross-cultural gem that is spiked with superb performances, colorful characters, and one of the great closing sequences in recent memory.
Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness
The path begins with cultivating appreciation of our oneness with others through generosity, non-harming, right speech, and right action.
Cultivating appreciation of our oneness with others
When You Greet Me I Bow
Norman Fischer is a Zen teacher, poet, writer, and Jewish meditation instructor. As we say in our Living Spiritual Teachers Project feature about him, read his writings for:
The essentials of spiritual maturity from an interreligious perspective;
Kind, intelligent help navigating life's perils and pitfalls;
A willingness to explore ever-changing conditions and let go of everything, including Zen.
When You Greet Me I Bow is the most comprehensive, wide-ranging collection of his teachings ever published. It gathers together his best essays, several of them first written in the 1990s (the earliest from 1992), with a sampling from each decade since, including as recently as 2019. Many of these short writings first appeared in Buddhist magazines such as Tricycle, Shambhala Sun/Lion’s Roar, and BuddhaDharma.
Norman’s introductory remarks were written, he tells us, in May 2020, as he anticipates and hopes for a recovery from the pain of the pandemic. He wishes that we might all be “overcome with a moral imperative to take care of one another,” and this is the very spirit of all these writings, whether the essay is about falling in love, finding a teacher, the writing life, caring for your body, death and suffering, bowing, landscapes, understandings of God, or plucking the ripe fruit from religious texts in the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism or the Hebrew scriptures of the Psalms.
This short passage from an essay titled “Suffering Opens the Real Path” reflects Fischer’s easy style of communicating a lifetime of study and mediation practice:
“There’s something beautiful about quiet and peace. There’s something beautiful about not trying to do anything, but simply, in some way, your heart joining the whole world. There’s a time in life when we should be running around doing things. We should go out dancing; there’s a time in life for that. There’s a time in life for building something up in this world, a family, an institution, a business, a creative life; there’s a time for that. There’s also a time for becoming quiet, a time for slow conversations with people that we love, and a time for reflecting on all the things that we’ve seen in many years of living. When the time for those things comes, it’s beautiful. It’s not a terrible thing, it’s sweet. There’s also a time for letting go of our life, not ‘Damn, somebody’s snatching this away from me,’ but ‘Yes, it’s beautiful to exhale after you inhale.’ At the right time, when the chest is full, breathe out and let go.”
Then he explains how this teaching relates to Buddhist cosmology. This is a wise book.
The universality in these teachings will appeal to anyone on a spiritual path and speaks to people of any religious tradition, or none. What matters most, as Fischer writes in the excerpt that accompanies this review: “Friendship is the most important element in the spiritual path … [it] ripens and deepens our capacity for compassion.”
The essential essays of one of our great interreligious teachers, reflecting a lifetime devoted to spiritual creativity.
365 Ways to Live Generously
Sharon Lipinski is the founder of Change Gangs: Virtual Giving Circles, the largest electronic repository of information documenting the tools, strategies, and accomplishments of some of America's 800 charitable giving circles. In this wide-ranging and morally uplifting paperback, Lipinski defines generosity as "intentionally, freely, and frequently giving to improve your life and the lives of others."
For many, this salutary virtue is little more than a head-trip. In several research studies, those who thought of themselves as being generous actually didn’t give as much as they thought they would or should.
Lipinkski discusses the seven habits which will help you unfold a generous life: physical health, mindfulness, relationships, connecting with yourself, gratitude, simplicity, and philanthropy. For each day of the year, she offers actions that will put one of the seven generosity habits into play.
The author has high hopes that readers will "find the courage, strength, and motivation on your journey to give more of who you are and what you have to give yourself, to your loved ones, and to the world."
Read a practice on Gratitude
A salutary and uplifting paperback on giving to others.
Radical Hospitality
"Hospitality is a lively, courageous, and convivial way of living that challenges our compulsion either to turn away or to turn inward and disconnect ourselves from others," write Father Daniel Homan, a Benedictine monk, and Lonni Collins Pratt, a journalist and retreat leader. In these fearful times, more and more people are consciously closing down in the face of strangers. Terrorism and the war against it have made everyone feel more insecure and unprotected. The media keeps upping the ante of fear with stories about possible calamities on the horizon. That is why the spiritual practice of hospitality is now more important than ever. It is an antidote to paranoia. As the authors note: "Fear is a thief. It will steal our peace of mind and that's a lot to lose. But it also hijacks relationships, keeping us sealed up in our plastic world with a fragile sense of security."
The Rule of St. Benedict has brought wisdom and comfort to believers for over 1,500 years. One of its main practices is listening, being really present for other human beings. This leads naturally into hospitality, which in monasteries has meant giving guests the space to pray and to rest, to enter silence or to speak in intimate terms about their journey of faith. Homan and Pratt show how this can become a part of anyone's daily life.
Every week we meet strangers and are challenged to come to terms with them. If we have accepted the "other" within ourselves, it is a lot easier to accept that which is alien in strangers. The authors also discuss the ways in which boundaries can be useful: "Boundaries allow us to give more to others, not less. Boundaries do not exclude the other; in fact, if you become a person with actual boundaries, you are better able to give to other people because you do not feel diminished by them. Giving is a joy because you want to give, and not because someone has manipulated you and you gave in." Homan and Pratt are convinced that gratitude opens up a space in us to greet others. Just think about the times in which your heart was overflowing with thanksgiving for all of God's graces. It is during those times that we are most hospitable to others.
The hurtles to hospitality are fear, suspicion, and self-centeredness. They can all be overcome by an open heart. Don't give in to the fear mongers among us; put aside all illusions of safety and you won't be so suspicious of others; put the needs of strangers above your own and you'll feel the kingdom of God making new inroads in your life.
This is a new and expanded version of a 2005 book.
Makes a good case for giving this spiritual practice high priority status in these fearful times.