Quotes About Acceptance

Once we know, on a deep level, that we must die, we choose, in various ways, purposely to give up our life in order to dispel the unbearable feelings of helplessness and dread.

I hate the goddamn system, but until someone comes along with some changes that make sense, I'll stick with it. —Clint Eastwood as "Dirty Harry," Magnum Force, 1973

A dog will teach you unconditional love. If you can have that in your life, things won't be too bad.

The Dalai Lama has said, "Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.

understanding the ultimate source of your suffering doesn't, by itself, help very much.

This is something that can happen again and again via meditation: accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance

This is something that can happen again and again via meditation: accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the unpleasantness.

There's no doubt that meditation training has allowed some people to become essentially indifferent to what otherwise would have been unbearable pain.

RAIN. First you Recognize the feeling. Then you Accept the feeling (rather than try to drive it away). Then you Investigate the feeling and its relationship to your body. Finally, the N stands for Nonidentification, or, equivalently, Nonattachment

Dalai Lama has said, "Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.

If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we'd often be better off. Learning to do that is a big part of what mindfulness meditation is about.

He once recounted a time when he was trying to meditate and kept getting interrupted by sounds from a festival in a nearby village. Then, as he recalls it, he had a realization: "The sound is just the sound. It's me who is going out to annoy it. If I leave the sound alone, it won't annoy me. . . . If I don't go out and bother the sound, it's not going to bother me.

In fact, one of the take-home lessons of Buddhist philosophy is that feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we'd often be better off.

The Buddha believed that the less you judge things—including the contents of your mind—the more clearly you'll see them, and the less deluded you'll be.

So too with the case of the snoring yogi in the previous chapter. As long as I identified with my dislike of him, I was obeying natural selection's instructions to consider myself special (certainly more special than a guy who wants to catch up on his sleep when I'm trying to meditate!).

Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a better Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.

liberation from the craving to capture pleasant feelings and escape unpleasant feelings, liberation from the persistent desire for things to be different than they are.

liberation from the persistent desire for things to be different than they are.

accepting, even embracing, an unpleasant feeling can give you a critical distance from it that winds up diminishing the unpleasantness.

People say, oh it's a shame, you're not nostalgic about the '60s. Well actually, it's quite good, when you think of it. Wouldn't it be sad if I was sitting here wishing it back?

She kept to her bed only for the last two days, and did not stop conversing peaceably with everyone. Finally, no longer speaking, and already in the throes of agony, she made a big fart. 'Good,' she said, 'a woman who farts is not dead.' These were the last words she pronounced.

Sin embargo, se tolera, y se sonríe y se saluda... porque "así es la vida".

cada uno tiene que conocer en la vida muchas tristezas. Lo notable es que cada tristeza es distinta de la otra, porque cada una de ellas se refiere a una alegría que no podemos tener.

Acaso la vida es otra cosa que la aceptación tranquila de la muerte que se viene callando?