Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We become in part what our senses take in.
Everything beautiful has to be worked for.
When the mind is still, we can become an instrument of peace.
This is the central principle of meditation: we become what we meditate on.
Wisdom may be perennial, but to see its relevance we must see it lived out.
When we truly are putting others first, we cannot but feel at peace with ourselves.
Our deepest need is for the joy that comes with knowing we are of genuine use to others.
We have to have a purpose greater than the endless struggle to satisfy personal desires.
The ancestor of every destructive action, every destructive decision, is a negative thought.
As we get deeper, we move closer and closer to other people; we feel closer to life as a whole.
Nothing really worth having comes quickly and easily. If it did, I doubt that we would ever grow.
Every angry thought makes it a little easier to get angry the next time, and a little more likely.
Whatever we have done, we can always make amends for it without ever looking back in guilt or sorrow.
The capacity to be patient, to bear with others through thick and thin, is within the reach of anyone.
When we go slower, we are more patient and when we are more patient we have a choice in how we respond.
Imagine a hot tub for the mind. That is what meditation is; it can bathe your mind in relaxing thoughts.
Patience can't be acquired overnight. It is just like building up a muscle. Every day you need to work on it.
When someone at peace and free from hurry enters a room, that person has a calming effect on everyone present.
By removing that which is petty and self-seeking, we bring forth all that is glorious and mindful of the whole.
When we try to get ourselves out of the way, we can understand much better the needs of the people closest to us.
The spiritual life is a call to action. But it is a call to ... action without any selfish attachment to the results.
Human relationships are the perfect tool for sanding away our rough edges and getting at the core of divinity within us.
Through meditation and by giving full attention to one thing at a time, we can learn to direct attention where we choose.
Lasting change happens when people see for themselves that a different way of life is more fulfilling than their present one.
The real essentials of life - compassion, kindness, good will, forgiveness - are what is fundamental to living as a true human being.
Instead of looking at difficulties as deprivations, we can learn to recognize them as opportunities for deepening and widening our love.
When we meditate every morning we are putting on armor for the day's battle against our own impatience, inadequacy, resentment, and hostility.
Meditation is warm-up exercise for the mind, so that you can jog through the rest of the day without getting agitated or spraining your patience.
Mastery does not come from dabbling. We have to be prepared to pay the price. We need to have the sustained enthusiasm that motivates us to give our best.
The Lord is a good psychologist: he knows the way our minds run. Turmoil can be the Lord's way of tapping us on the shoulder and saying, 'Don't forget me.'
When we are at home with ourselves, we are at home everywhere in the world. When we have found peace within ourselves, peace and love follow us wherever we go.
A calm mind releases the most precious capacity a human being can have: the capacity to turn anger into compassion, fear into fearlessness, and hatred into love.
Like Gandhi, like the Buddha, like all great spiritual teachers, Easwaran had no use for beliefs unless they generated actions. Doing, not saying, is what counts.
Activity is not achievement. It is not enough to rush about beginning a lot of things and keeping busy. A well-spent life is one that rounds out what it has begun.
God made the senses turn outwards, man therefore looks outwards, not into himself. But occasionally a daring soul, desiring immortality, has looked back and found himself.
Having come to realize in the first stage of meditation that we are not our bodies, in the second stage we make an even more astounding discovery; we are not our minds either.
Love is so exquisitely elusive. It cannot be bought, cannot be badgered, cannot be hijacked. It is available only in one rare form: as the natural response of a healthy mind and healthy heart.
As the web issues out of the spider, As plants sprout from the earth, As hair grows from the body, even so, The sages say, this universe springs from, The deathless Self (the Supreme Soul), the source of life.
As meditation deepens, compulsions, cravings and fits of emotion begin to lose their power to dictate our behavior. We see clearly that choices are possible; we can say yes or we can say no. It is profoundly liberating.
We have no need to teach pure motives to the mind. All that is necessary to make the mind pure is to undo the negative conditioning to which it has been subjected; then we will be left with Pure, Unconditioned Awareness.
Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny private, shell-bound realm - which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world.
There are three kinds of violence: one, through our deeds; two, through our words; and three, through our thoughts. …The root of all violence is in the world of thoughts, and that is why training the mind is so important.
It is not action or effort that we must surrender; it is self-will, and this is terribly difficult. You must do your best constantly, yet never allow yourself to become involved in whether things work out the way you want.
Every human heart has a deep need to love - to be in love, really, with all of life. This is the kind of love that comes when the mind is still. . . . Be still and know that we are all God’s children; then you will be in love with all.
Today, everything I do from morning meditation on - eating breakfast, going for a walk, writing, reading, even recreation - is governed by one purpose only: how to give the very best account of my life that I can in the service of all.
At the beginning of every winter people are careful to install storm windows. These extra panes of glass protect their houses against the bitter winds. We do something very similar to protect our minds through the practice of meditation.
The earth was our home, she would have said, but no less was it home to the oxen that pulled our plows or the elephants that roamed in the forest and worked for us. They lived with us as partners whose well-being was inseparable from our own.
I like to remind my friends frequently how short life is. This is the important message of death: not a day to waste, not a day to quarrel, not a day to brood upon yourself. This is not losing the joy of life; this is gaining the joy of life.
It takes a lot of experience of life to see why some relationships last and others do not. But we do not have to wait for a crisis to get an idea of the future of a particular relationship. Our behavior in little every incidents tells us a great deal.
We can all learn to conquer hatred through love -drawing on the power released through the practice of meditation to throw all our weight, all our energy, and all our will on the side of what is patient, forgiving, and selfless in ourselves and others.