Quotes About Meditation

Here. Right here, right now bring your mind to this place and time. Invite it, even if it resists, to sit and witness what it is to be alive. Let there be no ulterior motive in this moment but to be. Rest on the waves of breath and choose to experience all of it. Let thoughts float through and leave again, as the mind slowly settles like snow inside a shaken paperweight. This is all there is. Here. Right here and now.

If you want to talk to God, pray. If you want him to talk to you, read your scriptures.

I'm in a constant process of thinking about things. I'll think about things for thirty or forty years before I'll write it.

There he lived in solitary grandeur, eating and sleeping alone (and these were his principal occupations), and communing with his own dignity

The past does not exist. The future does not exist. One should concentrate the mind on the present moment.

The Gnostic Christ (and the historical Jesus), like the Buddha, like Krishna, like Lao Tzu, taught that all material things are impermanent—whether they be riches, or one's own body. Attachment to that which is impermanent causes suffering. Give up attachment and suffering ceases.

Those whose happiness is within, whose peace is within, whose light is within—that person becomes free.

The human mind has often been compared to a hyper-active chattering monkey who refuses to stop moving or shut up.

I don the robe of hermit without a cry.

He was getting disgusted at this increasing nostalgic preoccupation with the past. It was a weakness, he knew, a weakness he could scarcely afford if he intended to go on. And yet he kept discovering himself drifting into extensive meditation on aspects of the past. It was almost more than he could control, and it was making him furious with himself.

An old man, I want only peace. The things of this world mean nothing. I know no good way to live and I can't stop getting lost in my thoughts, my ancient forests. The wind that waves the pines loosens my belt. The mountain moon lights me as I play my lute.

He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere

Reading is the last act of secular prayer.

A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

Way too late in life, Els learned that the time to concentrate yourself was right before sunrise.

he reads the same paragraph a dozen times; the words turn into twirling things, like winged seeds spinning in the air.

auto-suggestion.

You can travel everywhere, just by standing still.

But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.

You can unlock spiritual things only from within.

But in this book, I use "prayer" as the umbrella word for any interior journeys or practices that allow you to experience faith, hope, and love within yourself.

Thomas Merton, say it, as he so often does: "A door opens in the center of our being, and we seem to fall through it into immense depths, which although they are infinite—are still accessible to us. All eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact.

I believe that there are two necessary paths enabling us to move toward wisdom: a radical journey inward and a radical journey outward. For

I believe the contemplative mind is the mind of Christ.