Peace Quotes

Let the beauty we love be what we do. Rumi
Let everything you do be done in love. 1 Corinthians 16:14
'Love is the measure.' Dorothy Day
'Gather yourselves...All that we do now must
be done in a sacred manner.' Hopi Elders 2001
:Working for Peace
:In Plum Village in France, we receive many letters from the refugee camps in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, hundreds each week. It is very painful to read them, but we have to do it, we have to be in contact. We try our best to help, but the suffering is enormous, and sometimes we are discouraged. It is said that half the boat people die in the ocean; only half arrive at the shores in Southeast Asia.
:There are many young girls, boat people, who are raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many countries try to help the government of Thailand prevent that kind of piracy, sea pirates continue to inflict much suffering on the refugees. One day we received a letter telling us about a young girl on a small boat who was raped by a Thai pirate.
:She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself. When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we cannot do that. In my meditation I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I am now the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate. I cannot condemn myself so easily. In my meditation, I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in twenty-five years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in twenty-five years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.
:Spirituality is the art of mastering our fire. Buddhism does not offer an escape into a metaphysical paradise. It offers the opportunity to become the master of the fire.
:~David Brazier
One does not practice in order to reach enlightenment: practice is enlightenment and enlightenment is practice.
~Dogen
It's not what we can get, but what we can give that makes life worthwhile.
~Minh Tam
* "There is no way to peace; peace is the way." ~A. J. Muste A.J. Muste Memorial Institute - NY[1] (http://www.ajmuste.org/)
* "Peace can only last where human rights are respected, and where individuals and nations are free."
* "It is easier to meditate than to actually do something for others. I feel that merely to meditate on compassion is to take the passive option. Our meditation should form the basis for action, for seizing the opportunity to do something" ~ Dalai Lama
And so it is that where another man might tell you to withdraw all your 
powers and thought within yourself and worship God there - and he would be 
saying what was absolutely right and true - I do not care to do so, because 
of my fear of a wrong and physical interpretation of what is said. But what 
I will say is this. See that in no sense you withdraw into yourself. And 
briefly, I do not want you to be outside or above, behind or beside 
yourself either!
"Well" you will say, "where am I to be? 'Nowhere' according to you!" And 
you will be quite right! Nowhere is where I want you! Why when you are 
'nowhere' physically, you are 'everywhere' spiritually. Make it your 
business then to see that your spirit is tied to nothing physical, and you 
will find that wherever that thing is that you are giving your mind to, 
there you are too in spirit, just as surely as your body is where you are 
bodily!
from The Cloud of Unknowing
[author unknown English mystic of the fourteenth century]
* "I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it." ~ Dwight David Eisenhower
* '"If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace." ~John Lennon
* "The environment is very important in the aspects of peace because when we destroy our resources, they become scarce and we fight over that." ~ Wangari Maathai
- Interview - Issue 2
* "...no matter what someone else has done, it still matters how we treat people. It matters to our humanity that we treat offenders according to standards that we recognize as just. Justice is not revenge - it's deciding for a solution that is oriented towards peace, peace being the harder but more human way of reacting to injury. That is the very basis of the idea of rights." - Judith Butler, The Believer Magazine - Interview - Issue 2
from Wikiquote
In time of war the first casualty is truth.
--Boake Carter
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is
not a crime.
--Ernest Hemingway
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
--Thomas Mann
If we justify war it is because all peoples always justify the traits
of which they find themselves possessed.
--Ruth Benedict
Do not needlessly endanger your lives until I give you the signal.
--Dwight Eisenhower
Lakshmi said to Shiva: "Forewarned is four armed" Sam Pasiencier
==Inner peace in the scriptures==
*Buddhism ~ This is peace, this is the excellent, namely the calm of all the impulses, the casting out of all basis, the extinction of craving, dispassion, stopping, Nirvana. Anguttara Nikaya v.322
*Christianity ~ Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Bible, John 14.27
*Confucianism ~ The Master said, "In the morning, hear the Way; in the evening, die content!", Analects 4.8
*Hinduism ~ As rivers flow into the ocean but cannot make the vast ocean overflow, so flow the streams of the sense-world into the sea of peace that is the sage. Bhagavad Gita 2.70
*Islam ~ In the remembrance of God do hearts find satisfaction. Qur'an 13.28
*Judaism ~ May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace. The Bible, Numbers 6.26
*Sikhism ~ If a man sings of God and hears of Him,| And lets love of God sprout within him,| All his sorrows shall vanish,| And in his mind, God will bestow abiding peace. Adi Granth, Japuji 5, M.1, p. 2
*Taoism ~ Men do not mirror themselves in running water, they mirror themselves in still water. Only what is still can still the stillness of other things. Chuang Tzu 5
*http://www.worldpeacevision.co.cc/ - World Peace Vision
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ALBERT EINSTEIN:
"A human being is a part of the whole called by us
"the universe" - a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings,
as something seperate from the rest --- a kind of
optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion
is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our
personal desires and affection for a few persons
nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves
from this prison by widening the circle of under---
standing and compassion to embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature in it's beauty."
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"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become reality. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word."
- --- Martin Luther King
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TRANSFORMATION
To a disciple who was forever complaining about others the Master said, "If it is peace you want, seek to change yourself, not other people. It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth."
Anthony de Mello, SJ
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Life and Jah are one in the same. Jah is the gift of existence. I am in some way eternal, I will never be duplicated. The sigularity of every man and woman is Jah's gift. What we struggle to make of it is our sole gift to Jah. The process of what that struggle becomes, in time, the Truth.
~Bob Marley
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When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace. ---Jimi Hendrix
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