The conventional notion of patience is to be very kind and wait and hold your temper, repressing your restlessness…The bodhisattva, on the other hand, free from the compulsive concern with time, can just sit patiently without feeling that he is “waiting” for something else to happen.
~Chogyam Trungpa, The Myth Of Freedom
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Is there a personal Devil? This is more or less the same question as whether there is a personal God. If God, being much greater than we can imagine, is not ultimately personal but is capable of relating to us as persons, something more or less similar is probably true of the great downward force portrayed as the unholy trinity of “the world, the flesh, and the Devil.”…We may fear the Devil and struggle against him, but without him we would not be what we are.
~Richard Smoley, Inner Christianity
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“My friend, I still want to be a gentleman, and to be accepted as such,” the visitor began in a fit of some sort of spongerish, good-natured, and already-yielding ambition. “I am poor, but…I won’t say very honest, but…in society it’s generally accepted as an axiom that I am a fallen angel. By God, I can’t imagine how I could ever have been an angel. If I ever was one, it was so long ago that it’s no sin to have forgotten it…”
~Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky)
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