Henry Steel Olcott

He found that the pleasures of the eye, the ear, the taste, touch and smell are fleeting and deceptive: he who gives value to them brings only disappointment and bitter sorrow upon himself.

The joy that he brought to the hearts of others, Buḍḍha first tasted himself.

He who can mount to a clear conception of Nirvāṇa will find his thought far away above the common joys and sorrows of petty men. As to one who ascends to the top of Chimborazo or the Himālayan crags, and sees men on the earth's surface crawling to and fro like ants, so equally small do bigots and sectarians appear to him. The mountain climber has under his feet the very clouds from whose sun-painted shapes the poet has figured to himself the golden streets and glittering domes of the materialistic Heaven of a personal God. Below him are all the various objects out of which the world's pantheons have been manufactured: around, above—Immensity.