Quotes About Thoughts

In subjective terms, you are consciousness itself—you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. Not seeing it arise, however, the next thought will seem to become what you are.

In the East, especially in contemplative traditions like those of Buddhism, being distracted by thought is understood to be the very wellspring of human suffering.

This is not to say that external circumstances do not matter. But it is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality of your life. Your mind is the basis of everything you experience and of every contribution you make to the lives of others. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it.

Most people who believe they are meditating are merely thinking with their eyes closed.

subjective terms, you are consciousness itself—you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. Not seeing it arise, however, the next thought will seem to become what you are.

mindfulness" is not very clear, and it takes some training to distinguish between being lost in thought and seeing thoughts for what they are.

One must be able to pay attention closely enough to glimpse what consciousness is like between thoughts—that is, prior to the arising of the next one. Consciousness does not feel like a self.

It isn't enough to know, in the abstract, that thoughts continually arise or that one is thinking at this moment, for such knowledge is itself mediated by thoughts that are arising unrecognized. It is the identification with these thoughts—that is, the failure to recognize them as they spontaneously appear in consciousness—that produces the feeling of "I." One

After all, there is an enormous difference between being hostage to one's thoughts and being freely and nonjudgmentally aware of life in the present.

When you are able to rest naturally, merely witnessing the totality of experience, and thoughts themselves are left to arise and vanish as they will, you can recognize that consciousness is intrinsically undivided.

But it can be liberating to see how thoughts pull the levers of emotion—and how negative emotions in turn set the stage for patterns of thinking that keep them active and coloring one's mind.

When you find another person annoying, sexually attractive, or inadvertently funny, you are experiencing the percolations of System 1. The heroic efforts you make to conceal these feelings out of politeness are the work of System 2.

Primarily, that means learning to recognize thoughts as thoughts—as transient appearances in consciousness—and to no longer be distracted by them, if only for short periods of time.

Taking oneself to be the thinker of one's thoughts—that is, not recognizing the present thought to be a transitory appearance in consciousness—is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human conflict and unhappiness.

our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as appearances in consciousness—is a primary source of human suffering.

Meditation doesn't entail the suppression of such thoughts, but it does require that we notice thoughts as they emerge and recognize them to be transitory appearances in consciousness.

Meditation doesn't entail the suppression of such thoughts, but it does require that we notice thoughts as they emerge and recognize them to be transitory appearances in consciousness. In subjective terms, you are consciousness itself—you are not the next, evanescent image or string of words that appears in your mind. Not seeing it arise, however, the next thought will seem to become what you are.

You have a voice in your head that keeps saying things...haven't you noticed.

The first sign of progress will be noticing how distracted you are. But if you persist in your practice, you will eventually get a taste of real concentration and begin to see thoughts themselves as mere appearances arising in a wider field of consciousness.

Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves.

In order for love to exist, there has to be an affinity of thoughts, affinity of feelings, identical preoccupations.

It's good to know that I'm not the only unsuicidal person thinking about killing herself.

His comedy pleases by the thoughts and the language, and his tragedy for the greater part by incident and action. His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct.

To indulge the power of fiction, and send imagination out upon the wing, is often the sport of those [...] He who has nothing external that can divert him, must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not; for who is pleased with what he is?