People From Denmark

"It is quite obvious for me that what this private newspaper has done has hurt tremendously. Not only Muslims in Denmark but millions of Muslims around the world. I think it is not an intentional insult, it is negligence, it is lack of knowledge of this great culture, the religion of Islam and also a measure of error in judgement."

"Even though we (astronaut candidates) are doing science, we are in many ways the hands and the eyes of the experts who are on the ground, and so we are kind of an extension of them."

"I've been out doing 22 miles this morning."

"In retrospect I must say that being a manager or being a priest I don't really know if there's that much of a difference, right, it's all about guiding lost souls."

"A secure life and a well developed social system; not many people fall through the net. And shared values, I would say; that sense of equality..."

"Often it is the case that it takes ‘just a little’ to help and support people, so they can help themselves. I have met adults and children, men and women, whose living conditions are difficult for us to imagine, but every time I come away inspired by their strength and will to improve their lives and provide a better life for their children."

"“Why don’t you leave?” the woman in the poem asked herself. We need to stop asking that question and begin to understand why she is staying. From understanding comes the ability to reach, to touch and to change. And if we help even just one woman to take that courageous first step out of violence, we have achieved a lot."

"You can cycle through town and nobody shouts, "look, it's the Princess" – they are used to seeing us. Some people come up and say hello and that's fine. It's no big deal."

"Everyone has the right to belong"

"Knowledge of inner processes in body and mind is as helpful for one’s own preparation for death as it is for people who care for others who are dying. If one knows what to expect while dying, the conditions can be used and fears specifically removed."

"If one is able to convey to the dying person that his mind is bound to this decaying body only for the present life span, it is calming. If one adds that mind is beyond death and birth, like space, emerging appearances of confusion and aging become more acceptable. This view confers the often missing dignity on the last part of life. It helps the dying to increasingly relax, and oneself to face one’s own death more fearlessly."

"The essential art of dying consists of being easy-going and relaxed while at the same time staying mentally undistracted and one-pointed. Therefore, the one who is dying should imagine the most beautiful thing above his head and wish to go there as often as possible."

"Because long-held internalized views and attitudes appear especially powerful in death, the daily practice should include body, speech, and mind, so that the teachings slide from the head to the heart as fast as possible. It is certain and a real gift that the Buddhist methods will help in both this life and afterward."

"Just as what is in the jar, when broken, becomes one with the surroundings, death offers the opportunity to recognize the basic truth of all existence through non-discriminating one-pointedness. Like space, the essence of mind is unaffected by transition and death."

"If one understands that the only thing that remains timeless is the richness of one’s own buddha nature, one can relax even with regard to death."

"Enlightenment is not only timeless but also more beautiful, truer, and more indestructible than anything separable or conditioned. There is no greater happiness than the full development of mind!"

"The exchange between two mature, happy people enlivens their surroundings on countless levels and many can gain from it. Around them it seems that the world is enriching itself and the good feelings that appear are more than what the lovers are contributing themselves."

"From the great moments of their lives, many remember that the experiences of sharing love are much more honest and convincing than anything one could do for oneself. The joyful rush of living the highest principle of oneness and being there for everyone brings pervasive meaning and a sense of liberation, as if one has just broken out of prison."

"Generous love, the glue that holds everything together in a healthy relationship, aims for shared happiness through the fulfillment of one’s partner."

"Buddha’s advice helps beings by showing how one may consciously become a source of happiness and love."

"If we experience our power of awareness, feel something to be conscious right here and now, know that there is something between and behind the thoughts that perceives and understands, then everything is free play and a gift."

"The understanding that truth is not neutral, but is instead blissful, is something only meditators and lovers trust."

"A successful partnership thrives because of the willingness of both to place the well-being of the other above their own. When the man makes the woman a queen and she treats him like a king, their noble style dissolves any limits for growth. With this enriching approach, a living, completing love will emerge."

"A generous relationship rarely knows dramas. One is happy when the partner is happy. And one is happy when growing on three levels: on the physical level, which gives love, material things, and protection; on the inner level— through compassion and wisdom—which provides the motivation for development; and on a deep-lying, secret level where both partners enrich themselves with the qualities of the other and increasingly find their center."

"Lasting, fulfilling joy arises through the fusion of 'I' and 'You' into a 'We.' When both are in love and become one, everything blossoms, and the couple stands fast for each other and step in for one another. With such surplus, couples or families naturally spread their combined power into the world and gladly include others who want, and can, partake in the growth. With this, every aspect of life becomes a step along the way. And because relationships go so deep and generate such strong feelings, there is no feedback system that better enables a couple to get to know each other, and allows one to develop oneself."

"The 'taking love' leads to feelings of attachment, jealousy, anger, and childish self-absorption, while the 'giving love,' intrinsic in the tenets of Buddhism, encompasses the whole enjoyable realm of love, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity."

"With love, one is also constantly planting the seeds for the success or failure of a partnership, and knowing this, we are especially responsible for the happiness or suffering of those who have opened up to us. The increased intimacy in love relationships leads to an exceptionally fast ripening of both beings’ good and bad impressions in mind."

"It is impossible to learn to meditate while dying. Therefore, it is a great help to become aware of the dreamlike state of all things during this life, to have understood this at least conceptually, and to have practiced the ability to work with one’s mind for years."

"If one is wild and doesn’t like anything angry, when meeting with Buddha’s teaching one experiences joy and natural totality, as if two rivers flow into each other. And if one is basically trusting, the Pure Land is near, and in death, perhaps one will enter something deeply known."

"Giving up Einstein's theory of gravity is simply unacceptable to many in the community. It may take a new generation of physicists to view the evidence with unclouded eyes."

"Could it be, nevertheless, that Einstein's theory is wrong? Might it be necessary to modify it—to find a new theory of gravity that can explain both the stronger gravity and the apparent antigravity being observed today—rather than simply throwing in invisible things to make the standard model work?"

"Almost 30 percent of the total matter-energy budget is said to be composed of so-called cold dark matter and almost 70 percent of "dark energy," leaving only about 4 percent as visible matter in the form of the atoms that make up the stars, planets, interstellar dust, and ourselves. Such is the degree of discrepancy between theory and observations today."

"When I was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1950s, Sir Isaac Newton's presence was still almost palpable."

"Einstein entertained counterintuitive notions that allowed him to pull physics from the mechanistic, clockwork universe of the eighteenth century up into the twentieth century."

"The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant had conjectured that Messier's nebulae were distant "island universes" outside our Milky Way galaxy, but many scientists in the early twentieth century disagreed."

"Today, like the elusive planet Vulcan in the nineteenth century, dark matter is accepted by the majority of astronomers and physicists as actually existing. Dark matter, although it has never been seen, is part of the generally accepted standard model of physics and cosmology, which also includes the big bang beginning of the universe."

"Hunting for elusive dark matter is now a multibillion dollar international scientific industry."

"It may be that ultimately the search for dark matter will turn out to be the most expensive and largest null result experiment since the Michelson-Morely experiment, which failed to detect the ether."

"It is hard to understand how this infinitely dense singularity can evaporate into nothing. For matter inside the black hole leak out into the universe requires that it travel faster than the speed of light."

"Is the reader feeling confused about the status of the black hole information paradox and black holes in general? So am I!"

"Experimentalists dream of some spectacular discovery such as the proof of the existence of black holes to justify the more than eight billion dollars it has cost to build the LHC."

"A much faster speed of light in the infant universe solved the horizon problem and therefore explained the overall smoothness of the temperatures of the CMB radiation, because light now traveled extremely quickly between all parts of the expanding but not inflating universe."

"Inflation itself proceeds at a speed faster than the measured speed of light."

"In estimating the amount of dark matter, cosmologists developing the standard model have to make some rather strong assumptions about their observations."

"One truth we have been able to count on concerning scientific persuit over the centuries has been that only testable theories survive the intense scrutiny of experimental science."

"To physicists such as myself, the huge amount of invisible dark matter needed to make Einstein's theory fit the astrophysical data is reason enough for exploring modified gravity theories."

"It is difficult to falsify the hypothesis of dark matter, because, as with Ptolemy's epicycles, true believers can always add additional arbitrary features and free parameters to overcome any conceivable difficulties that occur with the dark matter models."

"A large part of the relativity community is in denial - refusing even to contemplate the idea that black holes may not exist in nature, or seriously consider the idea that any kind of new matter such as the new putative dark energy can play a fundamental role in gravity theory."

"This is the only sure way I know to counter the anti-Copernican idea that the universe is accelerating in our epoch - to get rid of the problem entirely!"

"Indeed, there is a now a minority of cosmologists who question a beginning of the universe at all; instead they favor a cyclic model with a series of expansions and contractions."