Quotes About Meditation

wisdom begins in wonder

B]y observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether... [like] when [people] watch and study an eclipse of the sun; they really do sometimes injure their eyes, unless they study its reflection in water or some other medium.

Homme, connais-toi toi-même!

Those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for death and dying...

The secret is not to "think" about thoughts, but to allow them to flow through the mind, while keeping your mind free of afterthoughts.

As long as you cultivate stillness, you may enjoy peace, but whenever your mind is a little bit disturbed, deluded thoughts will set in again.

Just look at your mind for a few minutes. You will see that it is like a flea, constantly hopping to and fro. You will see that thoughts arise without any reason, without any connection. Swept along by the chaos of every moment, we are the victims of the fickleness of our mind.

Whatever you find yourself thinking, let that thought rise and settle, without any constraint. Don't grasp at it, feed it, or indulge it; don't cling to it and don't try to solidify it. Neither follow thoughts nor invite them; be like the ocean looking at its own waves, or the sky gazing down on the clouds that pass through it.

We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. MONTAIGNE

Nothing could be further from the truth. But in a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify us; we protect ourselves from them with noise and frantic busyness. Looking into the nature of our mind is the last thing we would dare to do. Sometimes I think we don't want to

What is a great spiritual practitioner? A person who lives always in the presence of his or her own true self, someone who has found and who uses continually the springs and sources of profound inspiration. As the modern English writer Lewis Thompson wrote: 'Christ, supreme poet, lived truth so passionately that every gesture of his, at once pure Act and perfect Symbol, embodies the transcendent.' To embody the transcendent is why we are here.

OM AH HUM VAJRA GURU PADMA SIDDHI HUM

There are so many ways of making the approach to meditation as joyful as possible. You can find the music that most exalts you and use it to open your heart and mind. You can collect pieces of poetry, or quotations of lines of teachings that over the years have moved you, and keep them always at hand to elevate your spirit.

Now when the bardo of this life is dawning upon me, I will abandon laziness for which life has no time, Enter, undistracted, the path of listening and hearing, reflection and contemplation, and meditation, Making perceptions and mind the path, and realize the "three kayas": the enlightened mind;4 Now that I have once attained a human body, There is no time on the path for the mind to wander.

I shall never forget when Dudjom Rinpoche, in a moment of intimacy, leaned toward me and said in his soft, hoarse, slightly high-pitched voice: "You know, don't you, that actually all these things around us go away, just go away . . ." With

Milarepa wrote: In horror of death, I took to the mountains— Again and again I meditated on the uncertainty of the hour of death, Capturing the fortress of the deathless unending nature of mind. Now all fear of death is over and done.

Tibetan thangka paintings and derive strength from their beauty.

A real miracle, he said, was if someone could liberate just one negative emotion. More

The Dalai Lama has warned: 'Too many people have the Dharma only on their lips. Instead of using the Dharma to destroy their own negative thoughts, they regard the Dharma as a possession and themselves as the owner.

Thomas Merton wrote: "What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.

The posture we take when we meditate signifies that we are linking absolute and relative, sky and ground, heaven and earth, like two wings of a bird, integrating the skylike, deathless nature of mind and the ground of our transient, mortal nature. The

Meditation is not striving, but naturally becoming assimilated into it.

meditation, the supreme antidote to distraction, brings the mind home and enables it to settle into its natural state.

One of the greatest Buddhist traditions calls the nature of mind "the wisdom of ordinariness.