"The Buddhist nirvana is defined as release from samsara, literally the Round of Birth and Death, that is, from life lived in a vicious circle, as an endlessly repetitious attempt to solve a false problem. Samsara is therefore comparable to attempts to square the circle, trisect the angle, or construct a mechanism of perpetual motion. A puzzle which has no solution forces one to go over the same ground again and again."
Nirvana, in the Indian religions, is the concept of an individual's passions being extinguished as the ultimate state of salvation, release, or liberation from suffering (duhkha) and from the cycle of birth and rebirth (samsaara)
"Nirvana is a state of pure bliss and knowledge. ... It has nothing to do with the individual. The ego or its separation is an illusion. Indeed in a certain sense two "I"s are identical namely when one disregards all special contents — their Karma. The goal of man is to preserve his Karma and to develop it further ... when man dies his Karma lives and creates for itself another carrier."
"At his death, the Arhat is never reincarnated; he invariably attains Nirvana— a word, by the bye, falsely interpreted by the Christian scholars and skeptical commentators. Nirvana is the world of cause in which all deceptive effects or delusions of our senses disappear. p. 346"
"Nirvana transcends all duality of knower and known, of being and non-being."
"Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day is come."
"I myself had my experience of Nirvana and silence in the Brahman; ... it came first simply by an absolute stillness and blotting out as it were of all mental, emotional and other inner activities. ... I did not become aware of any pure I nor even of any self, impersonal or other - there was only an awareness of That as the sole Reality, all else being quite unsubstantial, void, non-real. As to what realized that reality, it was a nameless consciousness which was not other than that; one could perhaps say this, though hardly even so much as this, since there was no mental concept of it, but not more. ... Consciousness (not this or that part of consciousness or an I of any kind) suddenly emptied itself of all inner contents and remained aware only of unreal surroundings and of Something real but ineffable."
"[Nirvana has been called] the harbour of refuge, the cool cave, the island amidst the floods, the place of bliss, emancipation, liberation, safety, the supreme, the transcendental, the uncreated, the tranquil, the home of ease, the calm, the end of suffering, the medicine for all evil, the unshaken, the ambrosia, the immaterial, the imperishable, the abiding, the further shore, the unending, the bliss of effort, the supreme joy, the ineffable, the detachment, the holy city, and many others."