Meditation Quotes to Improve your Life
These Meditation Quotes come from a wide spectrum of thinkers, artists, activists, writers and people across historical time and geographical space.
Scroll through and find useful wisdom, humour and insight in equal abundance.
Meditation Quotes
“I have lived with several Zen masters — all of them cats.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
“The Way to do is to be.”
― Lao Tzu
“Sometimes you need to sit lonely on the floor in a quiet room in order to hear your own voice and not let it drown in the noise of others.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, You’re Doing Just Fine
“In zazen, leave your front door and your back door open. Let thoughts come and go. Just don’t serve them tea.”
― Shunryu Suzuki
“Undisturbed calmness of mind is attained by cultivating friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and indifference toward the wicked.”
― Patanjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
“Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.”
― Voltaire
“An interval of meditation, serious and grateful, was the best corrective of everything dangerous.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion
“Of our thinking it is but the upper surface that we shape into articulate thought; underneath the region of argument and conscious discourse lies the region of meditation.”
― Thomas Carlyle
“I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.
By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
“Meditation is an essential travel partner on your journey of personal transformation. Meditation connects you with your soul,and this connection gives you access to your intuition, your heartfelt desires, your integrity, and the inspiration to create a life you love.”
― Sarah McLean
“Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.”
― Hélène Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays
“Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life
“The closer you come to knowing that you alone create the world of your experience, the more vital it becomes for you to discover just who is doing the creating.”
― Eric Micha’el Leventhal
Meditation Quotes by Sogyal Rinpoche
“The act of meditation is being spacious.”
― Sogyal Rinpoche
“Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature.
Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation.
Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing.
And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.”
― Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
“We are fragmented into so many different aspects. We don´t know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should identify with or believe in.
So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions, leaving nobody at home.
Meditation, then, is bringing the mind home.”
― Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
“What we are experiencing is experiential poverty. Such poverty may not only be about a lack of experiences, where nothing is happening.
An abundance of activities can also create a feeling of experiential poverty. And this last point is interesting.
Things just get to be too much. the problem, according to Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, is that we carry on seeking “increasingly more powerful experiences” instead of pausing to breathe deeply, shut out the world and use the time to experience ourselves.
The idea that boredom can be avoided by constantly pursuing something new, being available around the clock, sending messages and clicking further, watching something you haven’t yet seen, is naive.
The more you try to avoid boredom, the more bored you become. Routine is like that too… Busying oneself becomes a goal in and of itself, instead of allowing that same restlessness to lead you somewhere further.”
― Erling Kagge, Stillhet i støyens tid. Gleden ved å stenge verden ute
Meditation Quotes by Sharon Salzberg
“It is never too late to turn on the light. Your ability to break an unhealthy habit or turn off an old tape doesn’t depend on how long it has been running; a shift in perspective doesn’t depend on how long you’ve held on to the old view.
When you flip the switch in that attic, it doesn’t matter whether its been dark for ten minutes, ten years or ten decades.
The light still illuminates the room and banishes the murkiness, letting you see the things you couldn’t see before.
It is never too late to take a moment to look.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation
“Restore your attention or bring it to a new level by dramatically slowing down whatever you’re doing.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation
“Mindfulness isn’t difficult, we just need to remember to do it.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation
“Meditation is the ultimate mobile device; you can use it anywhere, anytime, unobtrusively.”
― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation
“You are the biggest enemy of your own sleep.”
― Pawan Mishra, Meditation Quotes
“In meditation we discover our inherent restlessness. Sometimes we get up and leave. Sometimes we sit there but our bodies wiggle and squirm and our minds go far away.
This can be so uncomfortable that we feel’s it’s impossible to stay. Yet this feeling can teach us not just about ourselves but what it is to be human…we really don’t want to stay with the nakedness of our present experience.
It goes against the grain to stay present. These are the times when only gentleness and a sense of humor can give us the strength to settle down…so whenever we wander off, we gently encourage ourselves to “stay” and settle down.
Are we experiencing restlessness? Stay! Are fear and loathing out of control? Stay! Aching knees and throbbing back? Stay! What’s for lunch? Stay! I can’t stand this another minute! Stay!”
― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times
“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
― T.S. Eliot
“Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.”
― George Mac Donald, Wilfrid Cumbermede, Meditation Quotes
“If you don’t have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain’t getting them.”
― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
“You asked me how to get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don’t use logic when I do it. Logic’s the first thing you have to get rid of.”
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
“When somebody plays music, you listen. you just follow those sounds, and eventually you understand the music.
The point can’t be explained in words because music is not words, but after listening for a while, you understand the point of it, and that point is the music itself. in exactly the same way, you can listen to all experiences.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation
“Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet.
It is a way of entering into the quiet that is already there –
buried under the 50,000 thoughts
the average person thinks every day”
― Deepack Chopra, Meditation Quotes
“When your intentions are pure, so too will be your success.”
― Charles F. Glassman MD
Thích Nhất Hạnh Quotes
“Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.”
― Thich Nhat Hang, Stepping into Freedom: Rules of Monastic Practice for Novices
“Without suffering, there’s no happiness. So we shouldn’t discriminate against the mud. We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering and the suffering of the world, with a lot of tenderness.”
― Thích Nhất Hạnh, No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering
“Why are we such tortured human beings, with tears in our eyes and false laughter on our lips? If you could walk alone among those hills or in the woods or along the long, white, bleached sands, in that solitude you would know what meditation is.
The ecstasy of solitude comes when you are not frightened to be alone no longer belonging to the world or attached to anything.
Then, like that dawn that came up this morning, it comes silently, and makes a golden path in the very stillness, which was at the beginning, which is now, and which will be always there.”
Meditation Quotes from Jiddu Krishnamurti
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meditations
“To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meditation Quotes
“The soil in which the meditative mind can begin is the soil of everyday life, the strife, the pain, and the fleeting joy. It must begin there, and bring order, and from there move endlessly.
But if you are concerned only with making order, then that very order will bring about its own limitation, and the mind will be its prisoner.
In all this movement you must somehow begin from the other end, from the other shore, and not always be concerned with this shore or how to cross the river.
You must take a plunge into the water, not knowing how to swim. And the beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are, where you are going, what the end is.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti
Ramana Maharshi Quotes
“Your duty is to be and not to be this or that. ‘I am that I am’ sums up the whole truth. The method is summed up in the words ‘Be still’.
What does stillness mean? It means destroy yourself. Because any form or shape is the cause for trouble. Give up the notion that ‘I am so and so’.
All that is required to realize the Self is to be still. What can be easier than that?”
― Ramana Maharshi, Meditation Quotes
“If the mind falls asleep, awaken it. Then if it starts wandering, make it quiet. If you reach the state where there is neither sleep nor movement of mind, stay still in that, the natural (real) state.”
― Ramana Maharshi, The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi
Quotes from Amit Ray
“If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.”
― Amit Ray, Om Chanting and Meditation
“Looking at beauty in the world, is the first step of purifying the mind.”
― Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations
“Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements. Once you understand the grammar of yoga; you can write your poetry of movements.”
― Amit Ray, Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style
“Self-observation is the first step of inner unfolding.”
― Amit Ray, Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style, Meditation Quotes
Osho Meditation Quotes
“I’m simply saying that there is a way to be sane. I’m saying that you can get rid of all this insanity created by the past in you. Just by being a simple witness of your thought processes.
It is simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts, passing before you. Just witnessing, not interfering not even judging, because the moment you judge you have lost the pure witness. The moment you say “this is good, this is bad,” you have already jumped onto the thought process.
It takes a little time to create a gap between the witness and the mind. Once the gap is there, you are in for a great surprise, that you are not the mind, that you are the witness, a watcher.
And this process of watching is the very alchemy of real religion. Because as you become more and more deeply rooted in witnessing, thoughts start disappearing. You are, but the mind is utterly empty.
That’s the moment of enlightenment. That is the moment that you become for the first time an unconditioned, sane, really free human being.”
― Osho
“One thing: you have to walk, and create the way by your walking; you will not find a ready-made path. It is not so cheap, to reach to the ultimate realization of truth.
You will have to create the path by walking yourself; the path is not ready-made, lying there and waiting for you. It is just like the sky: the birds fly, but they don’t leave any footprints.
You cannot follow them; there are no footprints left behind.”
― Osho
“Nobody can say anything about you.
Whatsoever people say is about themselves. But you become very shaky, because you are still clinging to a false center.
That false center depends on others, so you are always looking to what people are saying about you. And you are always following other people, you are always trying to satisfy them.
You are always trying to be respectable; you are always trying to decorate your ego. This is suicidal.
Rather than being disturbed by what others say, you should start looking inside yourself…
Whenever you are self-conscious you are simply showing that you are not conscious of the self at all.
You don’t know who you are. If you had known, then there would have been no problem— then you are not seeking opinions.
Then you are not worried what others say about you— it is irrelevant!
When you are self-conscious you are in trouble.
When you are self-conscious you are really showing symptoms that you don’t know who you are. Your very self-consciousness indicates that you have not come home yet.”
― Osho
“Include and grow. Include and expand.”
― Osho
“Thoughts don’t become things; thoughts ARE things.”
― Eric Micha’el Leventhal, Meditation Quotes
“Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter.
Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will.
Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic
“The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people.
But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God.
Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
“Respond; don’t react.
Listen; don’t talk.
Think; don’t assume.”
― Raji Lukkoor
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