Eternal life

"If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence."

Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

If this life is all there is, then it's hell.

Quiet is the doorway to silence

"An empty room is silent. A room where people are not speaking or moving is quiet. Silence is a given, quiet a gift. Silence is the absence of sound and quiet the stilling of sound. Silence can't be anything but silent. Quiet chooses to be silent."

Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

The self cannot enter the place of silence without first keeping quiet.

Human uniqueness

"Every person born into this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique. ... Every man's foremost task is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved."

Martin Buber, The Way of Man

As each and ever person exists only once and will be not be replicated, she is called to contribute to the world in an equally singular and unrepeatable manner. 

Why can't we get along with others?

“It is the conflict between three principles in man's being and life, the principle of thought, the principle of speech, and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow-men is that I do not say what I mean, and that I do not do what I say.”

Martin Buber, The Way of Man.

All our disputes with others stem from a fundamental conflict within ourselves. The contradiction or disintegration of our thinking, saying and doing causes others to question our lies. Many a time, we blame others for our troubles when what we need to do is to straighten ourselves out.

Doctrine of the Mean

“By the absolute mean, or mean relative to the thing itself, I understand that which is equidistant from both extremes, and this is one and the same for all. By the mean relative to us I understand that which is neither too much nor too little for us; and this is not one and the same for all. ... And so we may say generally that a master in any art avoids what is too much and what is too little, and seeks for the mean and chooses it—not the absolute but the relative mean.”

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics II. 6-7

There is no one-size-fits-all formula for everyone. Moderation is relative to particular persons because each man or woman is unique.