According to Eshin's Essentials of Salvation, the Ten Pleasures are but a drop in the ocean when compared to the joys of the Pure Land.

Men had been living a proud life, having felt no need for the spirit-until Christianity invented it.

For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.

The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.

To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It's never at such times that we become cruel or bloodthirsty. No, it's on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become cruel. It's at a moment like this, don't you think, while one's vaguely watching the sun as it peeps through the leaves of the trees above a well-mown lawn? Every possible nightmare in the world, every possible nightmare in history, has come into being like this.

We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.

When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.