All Quotes

"Joining the competition turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made,"

"In skies high, his talents shine, like plum blooms pure and bright, His form defies the winter's snow, a sacred being of light. With lofty heart, he claims no kin to the emperor above, His noble spirit dims the stars, unlocking the Great Pagoda."

"Mark this: He's not just any monkey. He's a monkey of merit. A monkey was made Buddha once."

"In Guanyin's grove, his greed won't cease, Southern tides bring no release. Schemes cloud his sight, On Bodhi Peak, he learnt life's worth is peace."

"A serpent youth in white, with furious gaze, Writes poems, dances, yet fierce in battle's blaze."

"With empty hands, he preached, yet gold was his quest, He left no wealth, just doctrines to attest. A life of greed, his doom was sealed tight, If deeds were weighed, would he still face his plight?"

"Endless yellow winds, sands stretch afar, In the land once abundant, no homes there are. Half-guai, half-immortal, who can decide? Thief or sage, why would he mind?"

"Indulging in desires, I am carefree, No fears, no sorrows, just pure glee. In land of bliss, at the Eight Precepts, I laugh with delight, Inherent nature blooms, a tower of light."

"Tending the furnace, stoking the flame, Making pills, to immortality aspire. Countless eyes and countless schemes, One misstep, and shatter all dreams."

"Once she rode the cloud chariot to the high terrace, Now she dwells in a secluded cave by the mountain base. The breeze by the frail bridge chills her delicate frame, Spring arrives, another bridal gown newly made."

"With powdered face and hair in a twist, A slender waist adorned with jade amidst. As charming as a maiden from the skies, Yet most formidable when she vies."

"On his red skin, talent may shine, Eyes glaring bright, a mischievous sign. Samadhi Fire forged, yet heart unrefined, The gate to Mount Ling lies within the mind."

"The furnace crumbles, bricks fall, a day of disgrace, Lament did he, the beauty he could not embrace. All his talents wasted on the golden son, Looking back, he's become a foolish one."

"Renowned as the mighty king, his life was far from plain, His spirit spanned the three realms, his fame touched four domains. Among the guais, a hero grand, wild and untamed, The sudden arrival of dharma left his homeland forever changed. With shadow as his companion, true enlightenment within him lay."

"You are your choices, your causes and effects, not what you're called."

"From dawn to dusk, toil's bitter strain, Day and night, home's burdens remain. Destiny shows no mercy, merciful she became Why is her household light the hardest to sustain?"

"John Diehl - Billy"

"The longing for the Orient accompanies the Occidental from the cradle to the grave. When the young farmer’s wife of the Far West, deep in the most remote forest valley of the Rocky Mountains, holds her first-born child on her lap and imparts to him the elements of the Christian faith, she tells him about the shepherds of Bethlehem in the land of Judea, far, far on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. She tells him about the star, which the wise men from the land of Chaldaea followed, and then of the rivers of the Nile and the Euphrates, of Mount Ararat on which Noah’s ark came to rest after the Flood, of Mount Sinai from which Moses brought the earliest tables of the law to the people of Israel, of the great cities of Nineveh, Babylon, Tyre and Sidon, of the world conquerors Cyrus of Persia and the Pharoah in Egypt-land."

"... The Bible is the book through which the world of the West, even in times of the most melancholy isolation, remains persistently tied to the Orient. Even when one ignores its character as a sacred book of revelation, and examines it from a historical and geographical standpoint, the Bible can be seen as a world-historical book of wonders, as the book which ever again reawakens in the Aryans of the West, who have deserted their homeland, that longing for the Orient which binds peoples together..."

"It was also religious need which in the educated circles of the West provided the most powerful impetus for the study of the Orient. The world of the West was captivated in its inner being by the information that it received through the Bible about the peoples of the Orient. But that which sufficed to please the taste did not satisfy the curiosity, which was afterward awakened. The Bible’s accounts of language, morals and religions of the Egyp- tians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Medes and Persians were too scant not to inspire the desire, in the era of the renascence of the sciences, for richer and more trust- worthy information about the lives of the peoples of the East. So arose, at first, in closest connection to the Biblical scholarship inspired by the Reformation, an oriental philology and archaeology. These [sciences] limited themselves for many centuries to the study of the language and religion of the Semitic people. But towards the end of the previous century the languages and literatures of the Sanskrit-Indians and the Zoroastrian Persians were redis- covered, and then arose, quickly and at the same time as the philological study of Semitic languages and religions, Sanskrit and Zend philology, to which soon too Egyptology and Sinology were added."

"Though generated by thoroughly western rivalries and concerns, invoking the Orient has often been the means by which counter-hegemonic positions were articulated; ‘‘orientalism”’ then, has played a crucial role in the unmaking, as well as the making, of western identities."

"But it was Sanskrit, not Hebrew, whose pure linguistic forms were lovingly cultivated by many of the late romantics, and it was the ethical wisdom of the Rig Veda, Hermann Brunnhofer claimed, which represented the ‘‘ethno-psychological foundation’”’ of the Germans, Celts, Slavs, Greeks, and Indians; “in reading the Vedas,” he wrote in 1893, “‘tat tvam asi, ‘that art thou’ resounds in our racial subconsciousness and fills us with pride. ...”"

"If you take away from the Latin, German, and Slavic nations of our day on both sides of the ocean that which they owe to the peoples of Greece and Israel, a great deal would be gone. But we can’t even finish this line of argument; it is simply impossible to deprive these nations of that which was borrowed and to separate it from their very being. It has so permeated their blood and sap, that it constitutes part of the organism itself, which in turn has become its carrier and transmitter. It was the ladder by which these nations ascended to the top, or even better: it was the electrical current which unleashed the slumbering forces within them. Hellenism and Hebraism or — to speak without affectation — Judaism, have together created an atmosphere of ideas without which civilized nations would be unthinkable.... The part played by Hellenism in the rebirth of civilization is acknowledged freely and without envy. It dispersed the flowers of art and the fruits of knowledge. It unveiled the realm of beauty and illuminated it with an Olympian clarity of thought. And a regenerative power continues to pour forth from this literature and the legacy of its artistic ideal. The classical Greeks are dead, and toward them deceased posterity behaves properly. Envy and hatred are silent at the grave of the dead; their contributions are, in fact, usually exaggerated. It is quite different with that other creative nation, the Hebrews. Precisely because they’re still alive their contributions to culture are not generally acknowledged; they are criticized, or given another name to partially conceal their authorship or to dislodge them entirely."

"One presupposition, which in this matter has been of great harm and continues to do harm, is the separation between oriental and Greek studies and [the Greek and oriental] mind; [this] is increasingly concocted and arbitrarily applied, as if this grand difference had foundations in reality. In the history of humankind the inhabitants of Asia and the Europeans are to be seen as members of one family, whose history ought never to be divided, if one wants to understand the whole."

"Interest in the Greeks was again partly theological; the world of the church fathers was one suffused with questions about relations between the Greeks and the Jews — after all, the earliest extant version of the Old Testament — the Septuagint — was in Greek, as were the writings of Saint Paul, and Greek is the language of the New Testament."

"Those songs will make you cry and perhaps fall in love again. For sure, you know very well the songs that we will sing. So expect to hear those songs and expect a good concert. Expect a lot of things."

"Our history of philosophy can only be the Greco-Roman-Christian one. We know neither the time of formation nor any kind of history about other, Asian philosophemes. Moreover, the simple beginnings of Greek philosophy, which developed from mythology, makes it unimportant for our purpose to ask whether this mythology did or did not have a foreign origin... ."

"Here, however, I will argue that the cultural politics of Orientalistik were defined much less by ‘“‘modern” concerns — such as how to communicate with or exert power over the locals — than by traditional, almost primeval, Christian questions, such as (1) what parts of the Old Testament are true, and relevant, for Christians? (2) how much did the ancient Israelites owe to the Egyptians, Persians, and Assyrians? (3) where was Eden and what language was spoken there? and (4) were the Jews the only people to receive revelation? The German Reformers’ attempts to clean up God’s Word had involved orientalist knowledge from the first — and indeed sixteenth-century humanists had already struggled with many of the philological and chronological questions that would plague their descendants 300 years later. Although new sources were added, the old ones — particularly the Old Testament, the church fathers, and classical authors — continued to exert a powerful effect on the imaginations of even the most cutting-edge scholars long beyond the Enlightenment."

"I have been forced to conclude that German orientalism — defined as the serious and sustained study of the cultures of Asia — was not a product of the modern, imperial age, but some- thing much older, richer, and stranger, something enduringly shaped by the longing to hear God’s word, to understand the meaning of his revelation, and to propagate (Christian) truths as one understood them. But I have also concluded, and will attempt to persuade my readers as well, that this legacy was by no means a simple one, and endowed German orientalism with a cultural ambivalence we have yet to appreciate."

"There were travel accounts and anthropological disquisitions; there were histories of philosophy and a bumper crop of inquiries into the history of mythology, which opened the way for investigations of such favorite romantic subjects as folkloric legends, epic poetry, golden ages, pagan gods, natural religions, and the hidden meaning of symbols. As in the case of Friedrich Schlegel, interest in the East arose remarkably quickly; Schelling perhaps saw similarities between his work and that of the Greek mysteries as early as 1802, but only in 1805-6 did he decide this pre-rational Greece had oriental origins. As his Bruno (1802) suggests, Schelling too came to his iconoclastic conclusions by way of the Neoplatonic, western images of the mystical and wise East, rather than by reading eastern texts directly. Christian Bunsen may have learned Mythenforschung from the elderly Heyne, but he took his ardent devotion to Sanskrit and Persian from Friedrich Schlegel; by 1814, Bunsen was determined to integrate the study of these oriental languages into German culture so thoroughly that ‘‘even the devil would not be able to tear it out!’ The romantic geographer Carl Ritter leaned heavily on William Jones and Friedrich Creuzer, but his remarkable Die Vorhalle europäischer Völkergeschichten vor Herodotus (1819) fleshed out an ur-Indian diffusionary history that was even more ambitious than were their models."

"..Iamblichus, Pausanias, Plotinus, and Strabo, scholars who wrote in times of relative Greek insecurity vis-a-vis the Orient and who not only appreciated their debts to the East but also, however dimly, realized that the perfect clarity of their Olympian culture was in some sense superficial compared to the mysterious profundity of their eastern neighbors."

"But Creuzer was also a product of his age and its aspirations; like Friedrich Schlegel, he was seeking a supra-confessional history of religion, and his combination of Neo- platonic sources and romantic ideas allowed him to craft a story of the western migration of myths and symbols, mysterious puzzles created by a small elite, who hoped to transfer true knowledge only to those intellectuals suited to understand it."

"This opened the way, as Partha Mitter has argued, for Hegel’s insight that since art represented not reality but some ideal of it, different cultures might have different ideals, and ultimately, much later, for Heinrich Zimmer’s contrast between the seductive but superficial beauty of the Greeks and the more profound religious aims of Indian forms."

"Though they tended to religious radicalism and political liberalism, most mid-century orientalists did not, as had Montesquieu and Voltaire, contrast rational oriental sages with western intolerance and cruelty — though there were a few philosophers, like Arthur Schopenhauer and Marx’s friend Karl Friedrich Koeppen, who continued this tradition. A few picked up Friedrich Schlegel’s suggestions about affinities between medieval Germans and Indians or Persians, and speculation intensified on the question of the ‘‘Indo-German” homeland."

"Despite the author’s commitment to universalism, Carl Ritter’s Vorhalle (1819) already looked in this direction. In this text, Ritter speculated that a prehistorical diaspora had pushed peoples from northern India westward, laying the foundations for European civilization. To demonstrate that the Black Sea kingdom of Colchis, mythical home of Medea and destination of the Argonauts, was not an Egyptian, but an Indian settlement, he depended partly upon physical characteristics, arguing that the Colchians’ facial features and hair were different from those of the Egyptians, though both were, according to Herodotus, dark- skinned.©® Ritter insisted that the Indians, Persians, Germanic tribes, Scandinavians, Greeks, and Scythians shared a ‘“‘common root” as well as a kind of primeval monotheism, commonalities that made them more like one another than were some groups who shared spaces contemporaneously, like the Romans and Etruscans, or those who shared it over time, such as ancient and modern Indians. Ritter was not too worried about dark-skinned Indian ancestors, but as the British extended more and more control over the subcontinent, this relationship between modern — “fallen” — Indians and idealized ancient Indians began to become more problematic. Increasingly pervasive was the view that India was not the homeland of the Aryans, but rather the place where Aryans had mixed with darker others, instigating the cultural decline and weakness that would characterize Indian history ever afterward. Those who elaborated this view included A. W. Schlegel, Christian Lassen, Theodor Benfey, and C. F. Koeppen.” That these leading Indologists spent so much time, and spilled so much ink, in discussing this subject confirms the field’s sense that this was not only a crucially important issue, but also one for which a variety of difficult-to-interpret sources needed to be read to yield essentially the same results.” If these scholars used “race” in varying ways, clearly it was becoming a more prominent, and meaningful, part of the study of the ancient Orient."

"But the “furious” generation did not want to tarry in positivist particularism, for they thought they now had the materials and expertise to tackle big questions. The biggest of these was the one ethnographers had failed to answer, classicists had ignored, and positivist orientalists had sidelined since the 1820s: that was, of course, Creuzer’s classic question, the question of the geographical origins of all myths, religions, and symbols, or, put differently, the question of the West’s cultural dependence on the East."

"What a large number did, however, have in common was the longing to return to subjects left fallow by mid-century scholars, namely, the impact of eastern cultures on western ideas; the erotic life of the ancients; and the role of religion in pagan antiquity. Certainly, the liberal positivist generation had begun to feel some of these pressures by the time they achieved chaired status, but most were unable and unwilling to alter their research programs to suit the new opportunities and new demands; often, indeed, their reaction to the next generation was a kind of retreat from lines of inquiry they feared would cast them back into the pre- wissenschaftlich world of their romantic forbears. For them, to break with Greek sources, as also to break with the Old Testament texts over which they had labored so intensively, was to lose touch with history, a disastrous leap of faith into an alien and mistrusted modern world. Many members of the fin de siécle generation were unequally dubious about the modern world — but they were, with respect to the interpretation of the ancient world, much more inclined to be risk- takers and self-confident propagandists for the Orient’s coming of age."

"Some academic linguists tried to discourage this neoromantic furor in their students, as did Lüders; but some were at least mildly attracted to it, and around the academy’s fringes, at least, one begins to see it seeping into scholarly circles, Both Eduard Meyer and Carl Becker — arch enemies over university reform during the Weimar period — found much to chew on in Spengler’s Decline of the West. The innovative, if peripheral, art historians Aby Warburg and Fritz Saxl were drawn together by their mutual interest in the impact of oriental astrology on western art — a subject near and dear to the hearts of the “furious”’ orientalists. Academic work in the circles that surrounded Rudolf Otto, Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Heidegger, Jung, Martin Buber, Richard Wilhelm, and Josef Strzygowski increasingly took eastern forms of mysticism seriously, and faced few — like Johannes Voss or August Lobeck in the 1820s — willing and able to drag students and scholarship back into neoclassical rationalism. Some of this ferment also touched literary writers like Hesse, Thomas Mann, Alfred Déblin, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Berthold Brecht, all of whom wrote orientalizing master- pieces — though of sorts that could not have been written in the mid-nineteenth century."

"If you take away from the Latin, German, and Slavic nations of our day on both sides of the ocean that which they owe to the peoples of Greece and Israel, a great deal would be gone. But we can’t even finish this line of argument; it is simply impossible to deprive these nations of that which was borrowed and to separate it from their very being. It has so permeated their blood and sap, that it constitutes part of the organism itself, which in turn has become its carrier and transmitter. It was the ladder by which these nations ascended to the top, or even better: it was the electrical current which unleashed the slumbering forces within them. Hellenism and Hebraism or — to speak without affectation — Judaism, have together created an atmosphere of ideas without which civilized nations would be unthinkable.... The part played by Hellenism in the rebirth of civilization is acknowledged freely and without envy. It dispersed the flowers of art and the fruits of knowledge. It unveiled the realm of beauty and illuminated it with an Olympian clarity of thought. And a regenerative power continues to pour forth from this literature and the legacy of its artistic ideal. The classical Greeks are dead, and toward them deceased posterity behaves properly. Envy and hatred are silent at the grave of the dead; their contributions are, in fact, usually exaggerated. It is quite different with that other creative nation, the Hebrews. Precisely because they’re still alive their contributions to culture are not generally acknowledged; they are criticized, or given another name to partially conceal their authorship or to dislodge them entirely."

"If you take away from the Latin, German, and Slavic nations of our day on both sides of the ocean that which they owe to the peoples of Greece and Israel, a great deal would be gone. But we can’t even finish this line of argument; it is simply impossible to deprive these nations of that which was borrowed and to separate it from their very being. It has so permeated their blood and sap, that it constitutes part of the organism itself, which in turn has become its carrier and transmitter. It was the ladder by which these nations ascended to the top, or even better: it was the electrical current which unleashed the slumbering forces within them. Hellenism and Hebraism or — to speak without affectation — Judaism, have together created an atmosphere of ideas without which civilized nations would be unthinkable.... The part played by Hellenism in the rebirth of civilization is acknowledged freely and without envy. It dispersed the flowers of art and the fruits of knowledge. It unveiled the realm of beauty and illuminated it with an Olympian clarity of thought. And a regenerative power continues to pour forth from this literature and the legacy of its artistic ideal. The classical Greeks are dead, and toward them deceased posterity behaves properly. Envy and hatred are silent at the grave of the dead; their contributions are, in fact, usually exaggerated. It is quite different with that other creative nation, the Hebrews. Precisely because they’re still alive their contributions to culture are not generally acknowledged; they are criticized, or given another name to partially conceal their authorship or to dislodge them entirely."

""Finally, I found my place, my contentment, my peace. Through you, God showed me that I can be taken care of. That I can be loved. I can be heard and understood for all the struggles and sacrifices I went through in life."

"Turns out there’s a lot of bitch work to be done to make mass deportations happen."

"My WWII vet grandfather didn't get a chance to kill Asians, so he volunteered for Korea. He'd be asking for a short term job with ICE kicking doors and swinging a baton."

"All blacks are foreign to my people, dumb fuck."

"Over the years I have taken on countless roles, and I am so grateful to have had you come along with me through them all. And now I feel like I’ve discovered the pinnacle of my purpose, the most important role I will ever take on—motherhood."

"My husband and I are overwhelmed with joy, excitement and delight to announce our 2025 baby."

"What was once anxiety in my heart due to more advanced age, and earnest prayers to naturally conceive despite multiple health conditions and against doctor’s prognosis, has now become the most pleasant surprise of our lives."

"Got me mad as shit (yeah), so I slapped the bitch."

"I'm tryna get high 'til I can't feel nothin'."

"I'ma go fuck that bitch (yeah), I'ma go thrash that bitch (yeah) Shawty gon' suck this dick (yeah), shawty gon' suck this dick (yeah)."