Quotes About Self-discovery

Pointing directly at your own heart, you find Buddha.

While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves.

The calligraphy reads, "Pointing directly at your own heart, you find Buddha." Listening to talks about the dharma, or the teachings of Buddha, or practicing meditation is nothing other than studying ourselves.

It's a continual process of opening and surrender, like taking off layer after layer of clothes

We can lead our life so as to become more awake to who we are and what we're doing rather than trying to improve or change or get rid of who we are or what we're doing.

We commit to doing all it takes to free ourselves completely from all our varieties of confusion and unconscious habit and suffering, because these prevent us from being fully there for others. In the language of Buddhism, our ultimate commitment is to attain "enlightenment." In essence, this means knowing fully who we really are.

I hold my teachers, beginning with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, so dear to me because of how they've been able to show me—and model for me—my own potential. It's like meeting a part of yourself that you didn't even know was there.

If we were to make a list of people we don't like—people we find obnoxious, threatening, or worthy of contempt—we would discover much about those aspects of ourselves that we can't face. If we were to come up with one word about each of the troublemakers in our lives, we would find ourselves with a list of descriptions of our own rejected qualities.

So whether it's anger or craving or jealousy or fear or depression—whatever it might be—the notion is not to try to get rid of it, but to make friends with it. That means getting to know it completely, with some kind of softness, and learning how, once you've experienced it fully, to let go.

Taking refuge is the way that we begin cultivating the openness and the goodheartedness that allow us to be less and less dependent.

On the other hand, this need to cling, this need to hold the hand, this cry for Mom, also shows you that that's the edge of the nest. Stepping through right there—making a leap—becomes the motivation for cultivating maitri. You realize that if you can step through that doorway, you're going forward, you're becoming more of an adult, more of a complete person, more whole.

Só encontraremos aquilo que é indestrutível em nós à medida que nos expusermos cada vez mais à destruição

Giving up hope is encouragement to stick with yourself, to make friends with yourself, to not run away from yourself, to return to the bare bones, no matter what's going on.

Your anger and emotional outbursts usually result when someone penetrates to the core of what you do not like about yourself or still cannot accept.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

Is it me you're describing, or yourself?

I sit before flowers hoping they will train me in the art of opening up I stand on mountain tops believing that avalanches will teach me to let go I know nothing but I am here to learn.

You can't sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it

If your heart is broken, make art with the pieces.

The good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it.

Art is a way of recognizing oneself.

For me, the martial arts is a search for something inside. It's not just a physical discipline.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

At culinary school, none of the things we use to define ourselves outside that world - actor, producer, student - none of that matters. It's a magical art form.