Quotes About Meditation

silence, simplicity and humility . . . the only proper state for the artist as for the human being

What is nothing? I impetuously asked. -It is what you can see of your eyes without a mirror, was the answer.

I wrote to give myself something to read.

I revisit my book piles. Trying not to be sidetracked or lured into another dimension.

a black granite cube containing only the character mu

I stared up at the plaster ceiling as I had done as a child. It seemed to me that the vibrating patterns overhead were sliding into place. The mandala of my life.

Free of all expectation or desire, she spun, and was at once the loom, the thread, the strand of gold

I came to experience a different kind of prayer, a silent one, requiring more listening than speaking.

sleep, without sound of itself, is the engendering space of sound.

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man's solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude

Solitary. But not in the sense of being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else.

On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.

For it is only in the darkness of solitude that the work of memory begins.

All the happiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room.

My mind was a blithering gush, a pandemonium of rhapsodic thoughts.

The mind has a mind of its own.

was it Martin Luther who told of a time when he was focused intently on the person and work of Christ? The Holy Spirit was there as if in the form of a dove, gently alight on his shoulder, and when Luther turned his attention to the Spirit and away from Christ, the dove flew away. This story may go too far in the other direction, but I believe it contains at least a modest lesson

There's a certain quixotic calm to an empty school hallway.

Pain can be better than meditation, because while meditation requires the constant choice to engage with the monkey mind, to gently push away those distracting thoughts, pain does the trick for you.

There is a way to master silence Control its curves, inhabit its dark corners And listen to the hiss of time outside

This withdrawal from the day's turmoil into creative silence is not a luxury, a fad, or a futility. It is a necessity, because it tries to provide the conditions wherein we are able to yield ourselves to intuitive leadings, promptings, warnings, teachings, and counsels and also to the inspiring peace of the soul. It dissolves mental tensions and heals negative emotions.

That deep silence has a melody of its own, a sweetness unknown amid the harsh discords of the world's sounds.

Whoever wants the "I" to yield up its mysterious and tremendous secret must stop it from looking perpetually in the mirror, must stop the little ego's fascination with its own image.

Among the values of meditation is that it carries consciousness down to a deeper level, thus letting man live from his centre, not his surface alone. The result is that the physical sense-reactions do not dominate his outlook wholly, as they do an animal's. Mind begins to rule them. This leads more and more to self-control, self-knowledge, and self-pacification.