Rta Quotes

Hero. The word slithered nastily in his mind. An honour bestowed upon you when you had killed all those who would have called you a mass murderer.

After all, love without self-sacrifice was just lust

A place where soldiers found themselves as rulers, Shakuni thought, can only breed tyrants.

A life unnoticed by Gods is boring and unimaginative, but a happy and long one.

A thing of beauty is said to last forever, unless it begins to speak. Mati thanked the Storm God that her Lamb had not proposed marriage. Nothing ruins an affair more than an effort to make it last.

I have some ideas,’ Krishna said with a twinkle in his eyes that arsonists might have when lighting a torch near a fireworks shop.

Righteousness, correctness, order, the Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence to reality.

We play with the gifts the Gods bestow upon us . And who are they to us? Either carpets to our thrones or casualties on the way.

Karna himself was dressed in passably aristocratic style in a caramel-brown knee-length coat that he was sweating in. A mark of a fraud, for the truly rich never sweat.

...leaving no doubt he was the Chosen One. Chosen for what precisely, no one bothered to ask.

On the contrary, tampering with things we don't know is the very essence of being a human. That's how we discovered how to make babies.

The man had committed genocide. She knew she could trust him.

You see, that's the thing with conquerors, they cannot stop conquering, for then they would have to start ruling, and my guess is Jarasandh isn't as good a ruler as he is a conqueror.

Volimo sjesti kraj svjetionika, pod njihove prijateljske vatre, ognjišta pomorskoga života... Tolike nas uspomene za njih vežu; okružuju ih predanja, legende koje su lijepe ali i istinite... Kad više nema na obzoru zvijezde, mornar ugleda svjetionik: vrati mu se hrabrost, jer ponovno vidi svoju zvijezdu, zvijezdu Bratstva... Svjetionik je bio oltar, hram, stup, kula... Rimsko carstvo osvijetlilo je od rta do rta cijeli Mediteran

But Asha was right. He should have felt victorious, elated even. And yet, despite his valiant efforts, he felt like a man who had finally opened the box of glory to find that it did not contain what was etched on the lid.

Shakuni wondered if the tea he had drunk had been poisoned. Even if it had, there was not much he could do about it. If death was coming, he would rather be sitting down anyway. Yet he was curious. Which of his crimes had the White Eagle uncovered?

This confirms what we have said about rta as the source of libido where the god dwells and whence he is brought forth in the sacred ceremonies. Agni is the positive manifestation of the latent libido; he is accomplisher or fulfiller of rta, its “charioteer”; he harnesses the two long-maned red mares of rta.100 He even holds rta like a horse, by the bridle.101 He brings the gods to mankind, their power and blessing; they represent definite psychological states in which the vital feelings and energies flow with greater freedom and joy. Nietzsche has captured this state in his verses: You with your fiery lances Shatter the ice-bound soul of me, Till with high hope it advances Rushing and roaring into the sea.102

But Krishna liked that about her. It had made her… realistic about things. She laughed with the knowledge that it wasn’t meant to last, and cried with the self assurance that it was futile. She was like a glacier, relentless and implacable. But eyeing the letter from Panchal, he reckoned that sometimes even a vast glacier could crack into crevasses under deer hooves.

There was a time when young Oracles awaiting investiture were made to witness the slaughter of their families, to sear into their souls the futility of hope. This sacred tradition had however, been abandoned by the Matrons over time, in favour of a meeker rite of passage into the House of Oracles. They reckoned the trials of initiation were lessons enough for the novices. Masha, on the other hand, thought the Matrons had grown soft.

Valkan life was one of violence, but it had not always been so. In their worship of the flesh of the earth, the hair of the forest, the breath of the wind and the bones of rocks, they had long abandoned their worship of wonder, of knowledge. The Valkas had been holders of arcane secrets, passed on from one generation to the next through word of mouth; knowledge that had helped them tame nature. Now, they just lived with the answer their ancestors had unravelled, having entirely forgotten their questions.

The brahman concept also contains the concept of rta, right order, the orderly course of the world. In brahman, the creative universal essence and universal Ground, all things come upon the right way, for in it they are eternally dissolved and recreated; all development in an orderly way proceeds from brahman. The concept of rta is a stepping-stone to the concept of tao in Lao-tzu. Tao is the right way, the reign of law, the middle road between the opposites, freed from them and yet uniting them in itself. The purpose of life is to travel this middle road and never to deviate towards the opposites. The ecstatic element is entirely absent in Lao-tzu; its place is taken by sublime philosophic lucidity, an intellectual and intuitive wisdom obscured by no mystical haze—a wisdom that represents what is probably the highest attainable degree of spiritual superiority, as far removed from chaos as the stars from the disorder of the actual world. It tames all that is wild, without denaturing it and turning it into something higher.

There is no need, I think, of further examples to show that the concept of rta is a libido-symbol like sun, wind, etc. Only, rta is less concretistic and contains the abstract element of fixed direction and regularity, the idea of a predetermined, ordered path or process. It is, therefore, a kind of philosophical libido symbol that can be directly compared with the Stoic concept of heimarmene. For the Stoics heimarmene had the significance of creative, primal heat, and at the same time it was a predetermined, regular process (hence its other meaning: “compulsion of the stars”).104 Libido as psychic energy naturally has these attributes too; the concept of energy necessarily includes the idea of a regulated process, since a process always flows from a higher potential to a lower. It is the same with the libido concept, which signifies nothing more than the energy of the life process. Its laws are the laws of vital energy. Libido as an energy concept is a quantitative formula for the phenomena of life, which are naturally of varying intensity. Like physical energy, libido passes through every conceivable transformation; we find ample evidence of this in the fantasies of the unconscious and in myths. These fantasies are primarily self-representations of energic transformation processes, which follow their specific laws and keep to a definite “path.” This path is the line or curve representing the optimal discharge of energy and the corresponding result in work. Hence it is simply the expression of flowing and self-manifesting energy. The path is rta, the right way, the flow of vital energy or libido, the predetermined course along which a constantly self-renewing current is directed. This path is also fate, in so far as a man’s fate depends on his psychology. It is the path of our destiny and of the law of our being.

«Hay dos errores que podemos cometer en el camino hacia la verdad.   No recorrer todo el camino, y no empezar.»   Siddha¯rta Gautama

Envy filled Muchuk’s heart. Was there any warrior as fortunate as a truly ugly one? And Asha was as ugly as rain on a wedding day.

Maybe they are running out of land for themselves…Forests cut down by the thousands. Conquests. New Kingdoms. Shifting cultivation. In the world we men have made, there is no room for them…or for that matter, us

And that is why, to Karna, this errand of charming Mardin to give up his seat had sounded much like convincing a man to give up his wife. He knew it had been done before, but he had absolutely no idea what words to use to achieve this result.

But he had no understanding of the virtues of moderation. He had the kind of generous nature that reckoned panic was not something you hoarded for yourself; you shared it with family.

And I promise you will find peace and harmony…in time…a wonderful wife who will beget you beautiful sons and strong daughters, who will themselves have children as fine as the Gods you worship

Then why do things that cannot be justified continue?’ ‘Because the men standing in the light of continuity are more powerful than those cowering in its shadow.

A life unnoticed by the Gods is boring and unimaginative, but a happy and long one.

Conscience was but a front for cowardice.