Quotes About Meditation

A daily dose of Nietzsche goes a long way.

I'll talk to myself out loud a lot.

I do all my thinking lying down.

Everybody knows if you don't have an examined life, you go mad.

Everyone has their own mantra.

I listen to a lot of 'Ave Maria.'

Charles liked poetry because the lines were so short. You could think your own thoughts in the spaces around the print.

Writing, which is my form of celebration and prayer, is also my form of inquiry.

There is a way of beholding nature that is itself a form of prayer.

The etymology of the Hebrew word for prophet, navi, combines three processes: navach (to cry out), nava (to gush or flow), and navuv (to be hollow). The task of this meditation was to open the heart, to unclog the channel between the infinite and the mortal, and rise into a state of rapture known as mochin gadlut, Great Mind.

Can there be a benediction of deer on a chilly spring morning? I think so. Their otherworldliness stops the day in its tracks, focuses it on the hypnotic beauty of nature, and then starts the day again with a rush of wonder. There is a way of sitting quietly and beholding nature which is a form of meditation and prayer, and like those healing acts it calms the spirit.

I will meet idiots today, went one version of her after-waking meditation, and one of them will probably be me. Iau Hau'hai, Queen of Life and of Making Things Work, grant me of Your courtesy the courage to shred that idiot's ears when I meet her, and then get on with work…for being right is nothing next to having things be right…

An unrested mind is prone to wander into unfruitful avenues; it is nothing that a good night's sleep cannot cure.

turn all the mirrors to the wall.

I left wide margins. In the left-hand one I noted any mannerisms, expressions and gestures that seemed to add something to her meaning. The right-hand margin I left blank. Later, rereading, it was here that I would enter my own thoughts, comments, questions.

myself, I found that my thoughts had been rearranged in my absence.

Mister Sensei Essay Writer Guy opens his eyes momentarily, smiles, and says, "When you are not writing, be thoroughly not writing; when you are writing, be writing through and through.

When we are chopping onions, we should be chopping onions only, right there, right then, at the chopping board, as if the onions, the knife, and our hands were all that existed.

It's odd how different a house feels when one is alone in it. It makes it easier to think rather private thoughts...

It is odd how different a house feels when one is alone in it.

There's nothing more, except that I usually sit down until the flames die down and try to think myself back into the past.

Contemplation seems to be the only luxury that costs nothing.

The time of our delusion does not obstruct the time of our realization. Our practice is not in order to attain realization. Practice itself is the actualization of realization.

Abandonnez les offrandes d'encens, les prosternations, le nenbutsu, la pratique du repentir et la lecture des sutras : restez simplement assis (shikantaza).