Quotes About Mindfulness

until we are willing and able to make the connections between what we are eating and what was required to get it on our plate, and how it affects us to buy, serve, and eat it, we will be unable to make the connections that will allow us to live wisely and harmoniously on this earth.When we cannot make connections, we cannot understand, and we are less free, less intelligent, less loving, and less happy.

I'm learning in my old age that the only thing you can do to keep your sanity is to stay in the moment.

La falta de comodidades es fundamental para que el hombre se sienta bien consigo mismo

The columnist George Will likes to quote a line that he says Cardinal Wolsey uttered about Henry VIII: "Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out.

Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won't be able to fulfill.

the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.

By contemplating the impermanence of everything in the world, we are forced to recognize that every time we do something could be the last time we do it, and this recognition can invest the things we do with a significance and intensity that would otherwise be absent.

One reason children are capable of joy is because they take almost nothing for granted.

Throughout the millennia and across cultures, those who have thought carefully about desire have drawn the conclusion that spending our days working to get whatever it is we find ourselves wanting is unlikely to bring us either happiness or tranquility.

We need, in other words, to learn how to enjoy things without feeling entitled to them and without clinging to them.

We can either spend this moment wishing it could be different, or we can embrace this moment.

Negative visualization, in other words, teaches us to embrace whatever life we happen to be living and to extract every bit of delight we can from it. But it simultaneously teaches us to prepare ourselves for changes that will deprive us of the things that delight us. It teaches us, in other words, to enjoy what we have without clinging to it.

one wonderful way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have.

Indeed, anger can be thought of as anti-joy.

After expressing his appreciation that his glass is half full rather than being completely empty, he will go on to express his delight in even having a glass: It could, after all, have been broken or stolen.

One key to happiness, then, is to forestall the adaptation process: We need to take steps to prevent ourselves from taking for granted, once we get them, the things we worked so hard to get.

A much better, albeit less obvious way to gain satisfaction is not by working to satisfy our desires but by working to master them. In particular, we need to take steps to slow down the desire-formation process within us. Rather than working to fulfill whatever desires we find in our head, we need to work at preventing certain desires from forming and eliminating many of the desires that have formed. And rather than wanting new things, we need to work at wanting the things we already have. This

anger, as I've said, is incompatible with joy.

Around the world and throughout the millennia, those who have thought carefully about the workings of desire have recognized this—that the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.

When the number of options available is limited, it is foolish to fuss and fret. We should instead simply choose the best of them and get on with life. To behave otherwise is to waste precious time and energy.

How, after all, can we convince ourselves to want the things we already have? THE STOICS THOUGHT they had an answer to this question.

Musonius Rufus tells us that if we live in accordance with Stoic principles, "a cheerful disposition and secure joy" will automatically follow.

There was also agreement that one wonderful way to tame our tendency to always want more is to persuade ourselves to want the things we already have.

William B. Irvine