Quotes About Meditation

Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," Blaise Pascal famously wrote in the late seventeenth century.

when you avoid solitude, you miss out on the positive things it brings you: the ability to clarify hard problems, to regulate your emotions, to build moral courage, and to strengthen relationships.

three crucial benefits provided by solitude: "new ideas; an understanding of the self; and closeness to others.

give your brain the regular doses of quiet it requires to support a monumental life.

Schedule an escape for yourself every single week. And do it alone. Treat it like taking medicine.

some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle.

After returning from a trip to India, where he observed the practice of adding meditation rooms to homes, he expanded the complex to include a private office. "In my retiring room I am by myself," Jung said of the space.

Bollingen Towers;

depth and meaning.

The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you're occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem.

Writing a letter to yourself is an excellent mechanism for generating exactly this type of solitude. It not only frees you from outside inputs but also provides a conceptual scaffolding on which to sort and organize your thinking. Not surprisingly, I'm not the only person to discover this particular solitude hack.

You must be on your guard for looping, as it can quickly subvert an entire productive meditation session. When you notice it, remark to yourself that you seem to be in a loop, then redirect your attention toward the next step.

Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights

cultivating "concentration so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems.")

When you avoid solitude, you miss out on the positive things it brings you: the ability to clarify hard problems, to regulate your emotions, to build moral courage, & to strengthen relationships.

for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone.37 Now what that X represents I don't really know … but it's a substantial ratio.

Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," Blaise Pascal

Let your mind become a lens, thanks to the converging rays of attention; let your soul be all intent on whatever it is that is established in your mind as a dominant, wholly absorbing idea." This advice comes from Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges, a Dominican friar and professor of moral philosophy, who during the early part of the twentieth century penned a slim but influential volume titled The Intellectual Life.

It is only when men begin to worship that they begin to grow.

Don't you know that four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still?

Imagination must constantly run on a new track or it becomes lifeless. A living imagination is essential to prayer.

Thoughts were zipping around my head like fireflies in a jar, bumping into each other, blinking on and off.