Meditation famous quotes
06-23-2025
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You should not be carried away by the dictation of the mind, but the mind should be carried by your dictation.
-- A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada -
At its core, meditation is about touching the spiritual essence that exists within us all. Our spiritual essence is not something that we create through meditation it's already there, deep within, behind all the barriers, patiently waiting for us to recognize it.
-- Aaron Hoopes -
To be free from bondage the wise person must practise discrimination between One-Self and the ego-self. By that alone you will become full of joy, recognising Self as Pure Being, Consciousness and Bliss.
-- Adi Shankara -
Even after the Truth has been realised, there remains that strong, obstinate impression that one is still an ego - the agent and experiencer. This has to be carefully removed by living in a state of constant identification with the supreme non-dual Self. Full Awakening is the eventual ceasing of all the mental impressions of being an ego.
-- Adi Shankara -
Curb your senses and your mind and see the Lord within your heart.
-- Adi Shankara -
Real meditation is not about mastering a technique; it's about letting go of control.
-- Adyashanti -
All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit is to stop seeking something more or better or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.
-- Adyashanti -
True meditation is letting go of manipulating our experience.
-- Adyashanti -
True meditation has no direction or goal. It is pure wordless surrender, pure silent prayer.
-- Adyashanti -
Meditation is not something restricted to times of formal seated meditation; it is most fundamentally an attitude of being-a resting in and as being. Once you get the feel of it, you will be able to tune into it more and more often during your daily life. Eventually, in the state of liberation, meditation will simply become your natural condition.
-- Adyashanti -
If you have time to breathe you have time to meditate. You breathe when you walk. You breathe when you stand. You breathe when you lie down.
-- Ajahn Amaro -
Meditation is like a gym in which you develop the powerful mental muscles of calm and insight.
-- Ajahn Brahm -
When sitting in meditation, say, "That's not my business!" with every thought that comes by.
-- Ajahn Chah -
Proper effort is not the effort to make something particular happen. It is the effort to be aware and awake each moment, the effort to overcome laziness and merit, the effort to make each activity of our day meditation.
-- Ajahn Chah -
When we sit in meditation and hear a sound, we think, 'Oh, that sound's bothering me.' If we see it like this, we suffer. But if we investigate a little deeper, we see that the sound is simply sound. If we understand like this, then there's nothing more to it. We leave it be. The sound is just sound, why should you go and grab it? You see that actually it was you who went out and disturbed the sound.
-- Ajahn Chah -
Of course there are dozens of meditation techniques, but it all comes down to this - just let it all be. Step over here where it is cool, out of the battle. Why not give it a try?
-- Ajahn Chah -
If your mind is happy then you are happy anywhere you go. When wisdom awakens within you, you will see Truth wherever you look. Truth is all there is. It's like when you learned how to read, you can then read anywhere you go.
-- Ajahn Chah -
Regarding this Dhamma, it is not something that we can simply talk about or take another's word for it. We need to develop meditation so that the understanding arises clearly within oneself. It is not the case that merely by listening to another's explanation our defilements will disappear. When we gain some understanding we need to chew on it again so that we see it for ourselves with certainty: paccattam.
-- Ajahn Chah -
Don’t be attached to visions or lights in meditation, don’t rise or fall with them. What’s so great about brightness? My flashlight has it. It can’t help us rid ourselves of our suffering.
-- Ajahn Chah -
You say that you are too busy to meditate. Do you have time to breathe? Meditation is your breath. Why do you have time to breathe but not to meditate? Breathing is something vital to peoples lives. If you see that Dhamma practice is vital to your life, then you will feel that breathing and practising the Dhamma are equally important.
-- Ajahn Chah -
If you haven't cried deeply a number of times, your meditation hasn't really begun.
-- Ajahn Chah -
Just go into the room, sit in the centre of the room, open the doors and windows, and see who comes to visit. You will witness all kinds of scenes and actors, all kinds of temptations and stories, everything imaginable. Your only job is to stay in your seat. You will see it all arise and pass, and out of this, wisdom and understanding will come.
-- Ajahn Chah -
Meditation is like a single log of wood. Insight and investigation are one end of the log; calm and concentration are the other end. If you lift up the whole log, both sides come up at once. Which is concentration and which is insight? Just this mind.
-- Ajahn Chah -
Meditation is a skilful letting go: gently but with resolution.
-- Ajahn Sumedho -
You can make any human activity into meditation simply by being completely with it and doing it just to do it.
-- Alan Watts -
Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
-- Alan Watts -
If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate.
-- Alan Watts -
Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.
-- Alan Watts -
I don't go out to parties because I'd look terrible in pictures. My escape is television - it's like meditation to me.
-- Alber Elbaz -
By observing natural scientific discoveries through a perception deepened by meditation, we can develop a new awareness of reality. This awareness could become the bedrock of a spirituality that is not based on the dogmas of a given religion, but on insights into a higher and deeper meaning. I am referring to the ability to recognize, to read, and to understand the firsthand revelations.
-- Albert Hofmann -
The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which love can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time.
-- Aldous Huxley -
I think to say that meditation is helpful to artists is true and it's great, but it's also essentially helpful to any kind of process of, just, life.
-- Amanda Palmer -
Rome is not outside me, but inside me.. Her feverish sweetness, her tragic countryside, her own beauty and harmony, all these are mine, for my thought and my work.
-- Amedeo Modigliani -
It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matters.
-- Amit Ray -
If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.
-- Amit Ray -
You are a cosmic flower. Om chanting is the process of opening the psychic petals of that flower.
-- Amit Ray -
Self-observation is the first step of inner unfolding.
-- Amit Ray -
Samadhi is the journey from individual to collective consciousness. The steps of Samadhi are the steps towards reaching the collective consciousness. In meditation, the more we radiate love, compassion, peace, harmony and tranquility, the more is our contribution towards the collective consciousness. The more we positively contribute towards the collective consciousness the more is our progress in Samadhi.
-- Amit Ray -
Meditation is a way for nourishing and blossoming the divinity within you.
-- Amit Ray -
Meditation is realizing and expanding your inner beauty in every direction.
-- Amit Ray -
Meditation is listening to the song of the inner Soul, seeing the beauty of the inner Self, smelling the fragrance of the inner Spirit, experiencing the touch of the inner energies and tasting the intense sweetness of the inner God.
-- Amit Ray -
Suffering is due to our disconnection with the inner soul. Meditation is establishing that connection.
-- Amit Ray -
Spirituality does not lie in meditating on the body of an ex-master. Spirituality exists in mediating on your own inner body.
-- Amit Ray -
You are the Golden Witnessing Screen. Meditation is the effortless effort to keep that screen clean, clear and perfect.
-- Amit Ray -
Meditate, Visualize and Create your own reality and the universe will simply reflect back to you.
-- Amit Ray -
Vipassana meditation is an ongoing creative purification process. Observation of the moment-to-moment experience cleanses the mental layers, one after another.
-- Amit Ray -
AUM or Om is not related to any religion because Om was practiced before the birth of all the religions of the world.
-- Amit Ray -
If you've ever swum in the ocean, and you go underneath the waves, you know, you're kind of moved by the currents, but you're not being slapped around at the top of the water by the waves. And that's sort of what meditation is like.
-- Anderson Cooper -
I meditate. Like, I try. Not every day, but even if I'm not doing that meditation, the moments of my day have changed because I'm not on my phone so much. I'm intentionally not checking my phone every two seconds.
-- Anderson Cooper -
For many in the modern world, carving out time for both traditional seated meditation and exercise has become close to impossible.
-- Andrew Weil -
Meditation is about learning how to rest in uncertainty.
-- Andy Puddicombe -
Most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind. But actually it's ... about stepping back, seeing the thought clearly, witnessing it coming and going.
-- Andy Puddicombe -
We can’t change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it. That’s the potential of meditation, of mindfulness. You don’t have to burn any incense, and you definitely don’t have to sit on the floor. All you need to do is to take 10 mins out a day to step back; to familiarise yourself with the present moment so that you get to experience a greater sense of focus, calm and clarity in your life.
-- Andy Puddicombe -
Drugs took me to places; they were like portals. It's kind of a cliché, but they were like portals to altered states of consciousness into ways of imagining the world, or seeing a world beyond this world, or seeing a world beyond this world that I might not have gotten to unless I discovered meditation and a very deep, intense spiritual path based on contemplation and meditation.
-- Anne Lamott -
I've always understood that meditation had to be part of - or was part of the natural path and so I've always sort of dabbled in it.
-- Anne Lamott -
I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me.
-- Anne Stevenson -
Meditation is a great way to keep my body well-centered while juggling shooting schedules and recording sessions.
-- Ariana Grande -
Meditation is not about stopping thoughts, but recognizing that we are more than our thoughts and our feelings.
-- Arianna Huffington -
Listening to classical music is a journey not a state; it's an activity not a meditation.
-- Armando Iannucci -
the more we abandon ill-will and hatred, the easier it will be to meditate.
-- Ayya Khema -
Integrated meditation practice is like a healthy diet which is indispensable for maintaining your vitality and resistance to disease. Likewise, a balanced meditative practice in the course of a socially engaged way of life heightens your psychological immune system, so that you are less vulnerable to mental imbalances of all kinds.
-- B. Alan Wallace -
Don't hate the arising of thoughts or stop the thoughts that do arise. Simply realize that our original mind, right from the start, is beyond thought, so that no matter what, you never get involved with thoughts. Illuminate original mind, and no other understanding is necessary.
-- Bankei Yotaku -
An enlightened awareness is within each one of us, right at this moment. This enlightened awareness is truly unborn and marvellously illuminating; and everything is perfectly managed by it. Conclusively realise that what is unborn and illuminating is truly awakened and without effort, rest naturally as the Unborn Mind. Resting in this way, you are a living Buddha.
-- Bankei Yotaku -
There are five stages of meditation, each one leading gradually into the next: concentration, meditation, contemplation, illumination, and inspiration.
-- Benjamin Creme -
It is astounding how much the immune system is strengthened by reducing daily mental stress levels with either visualization or meditation. The other great tonic for the immune system is love—loving ourselves as well as others.
-- Bernie Siegel -
If we spent half an hour every day in silent immobility, I am convinced that we should conduct all our affairs, personal, national, and international, far more sanely than we do at present.
-- Bertrand Russell -
No matter who you are, no matter what you do, you absolutely, positively do have the power to change.
-- Bill Phillips -
When you are free of form and not confused, you are focused. To be free of form externally is 'Zen.' Not to be confused internally is 'meditation.' External Zen and internal meditation, this is what we mean by 'Zen meditation.
-- Bill Porter -
Perhaps one of the greatest rewards of meditation and prayer is the sense of belonging that comes to us.
-- Bill W. -
I believe there is a time for meditation in cathedrals of our own.
-- Billy Joel -
Meditation is simply seeing reality and acknowledging it with bare honesty.
-- Bo Lozoff -
But people of the deepest understanding look within, distracted by nothing. Since a clear mind is the Buddha, they attain the understanding of a Buddha without using the mind.
-- Bodhidharma -
An Awakened person is someone who finds freedom in good fortune and bad.
-- Bodhidharma -
Understanding that everything is impermanent, that happiness is transformed into suffering, and that all phenomena are lacking reality in themselves and are only projections of our mind, will permit us to counteract the first hindrance to meditation, that is, our attachment to this world.
-- Bokar Rinpoche -
The fruit of meditation is not the absence of thoughts, but the fact that thoughts cease to harm us. Once enemies, they become friends.
-- Bokar Rinpoche -
When we let our mind relax, a moment will come when we rest without thoughts. This stable state is like an ocean without waves. Within this stability a thought arises. This thought is like a wave which forms on the surface of the ocean. When we leave this thought alone, do nothing with it, not "seizing" it, it subsides by itself into the mind where it came from.
-- Bokar Rinpoche -
Every creature is a divine word because it proclaims God
-- Bonaventure -
Rigging is like Zen meditation. You must bend over the boat until your back is breaking, until your brain is filled with numbers and fractions of numbers, until you can accurately measure an oarlock's pitch without bothering to use the pitch meter. Only then will you see the way of eternal rigging happiness.
-- Brad Alan Lewis -
True mindfulness is the awareness that everything you encounter is a vigorous expression of the same living universe as you.
-- Brad Warner -
Singing is a form of meditation... apparently the only one that I have command over.
-- Brandi Carlile -
Meditation takes place when you bring all your awareness to this moment.
-- Brandon Bays -
* Recognize that God is with you. * Acknowledge God knows what He's doing. * Search for God's will: the path He desires you to take in life. * Consider what God did for you when He sent Jesus to die on the cross (forgiveness and righteousness)
-- Brennan Manning -
It doesn't matter what it looks like; it matters what it feels like.
-- Bryan Kest -
Yoga doesn't ask you to be more than you are. But it does ask you to be all that you are.
-- Bryan Kest -
I've started doing yoga and meditation, but I'm not very good at that kind of thing and turning my brain off.
-- Cara Delevingne -
To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work... coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.
-- Carl Friedrich Gauss -
That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.
-- Carl Jung -
We must meditate before, during and after everything we do. The prophet says: "I will pray, and then I will understand." This is the way we can easily overcome the countless difficulties we have to face day after day, which, after all, are part of our work. In meditation we find the strength to bring Christ to birth in ourselves and in others.
-- Carlo Borromeo -
Watching birds has become part of my daily meditation affirming my connection to the earth body.
-- Carol P. Christ -
When the soul is naughted and transformed, then of herself she neither works nor speaks nor wills, nor feels nor hears nor understands; neither has she of herself the feeling of outward or inward, where she may move. And in all things it is God who rules and guides her, without the meditation of any creature.... And she is so full of peace that thought she pressed her flesh, her nerves, her bones, no other thing come forth from them than peace.
-- Catherine of Genoa -
Seek the silence frequently. Power comes from repose.
-- Charles F. Haanel -
During meditation, if we can concentrate all our attention on one point, and put all problems in front of it, then they can be solved immediately. Our power is great, but we never use it. If we do not use our power by concentrating on it, then it seems we do not have any power at all.
-- Ching Hai -
Meditation practice is a way of making friends with ourselves. Whether we are worthy or unworthy, that's not the point. It's developing a friendly attitude to ourselves, accepting the hidden neurosis coming through.
-- Chogyam Trungpa -
Concentration is the creation of the instrument; meditation is the right use of it; contemplation transcends it.
-- Christmas Humphreys -
If you don't have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain't getting them.
-- Christopher McDougall -
The seated lotus postures are an amazing way to go into meditation, or simply just to take a moment to ground oneself.
-- Christy Turlington
