Quotes About Mindfulness

To be jealous is to rub salt into your own wounds.

A man who thinks about business continually for eight hours is injuring his productive potential as much as he is abusing his body, cramping his mind, and ultimately losing his sense of humor and perspective... When work presses down most heavily, a 10-minute walk or a quiet cup of coffee with a crossword puzzle can restore efficiency to an amazing degree...

Your body is a temple, not a drive-thru.

Many Buddhist practitioners recite the Five Remembrances daily. The fifth is, "My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand."

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize... a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of [your child]...

Don't fake-live. Don't zombie-out as life goes by. Actually live!

In the map of your life, the best place to be is at the intersection of Here and Now. You can't get to any other place you want to be without starting from there.

Sometimes just looking up and seeing the light is enough.

With the Past, as past, I have nothing to do; nor with the Future, as future. I live now...

I need neither future nor past, but to learn to take today not too fast.

Don't let the past steal your present.

Having spent the better part of my life trying either to relive the past or experience the future before it arrives, I have come to believe that in between these two extremes is peace.

If you're always racing to the next moment, what happens to the one you're in?

Let the credit card companies market as they will, the only thing that's priceless is Now.

If you worry about what might be, and wonder what might have been, you will ignore what is.

In this light, let's not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness.

When I am anxious it is because I am living in the future. When I am depressed it is because I am living in the past.

Look both ways before entering the insanity.

Meditation is not a way of making your mind be quiet. It is a way of entering into the quiet that is already there — buried under the fifty thousand thoughts the average person thinks every day. And most of those thoughts are automatic mental responses we've developed from conditioning that fill us with anxiety and fear. They are nothing more than habits, and 99 percent of the thoughts you have in a day are the same ones you had the day before.

Meditation is not only sitting still like a Buddha-figure, nor is it thinking about something, for the Upanishads say that the stars, the trees, the rivers, and the mountains are meditating — unconsciously. Conscious meditation is a knack, and as an exercise it is a way of learning that Enlightenment comes to pass in us as much when we are doing nothing to produce it as when we are in the midst of activity.

Don't just do something — sit there!

Indeed, let us not forget, But also let us not dwell.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

And this prime hour of fragrance is the hour so many miss upon beds of sloth, never half knowing what a beautiful, marvellous world is around them. Not all the long hours of day can possibly bring back again the charm and blessedness of this, either to the body or to the soul.