MEDITATION QUOTES
quotations about meditation
In meditation we discover our inherent restlessness. Sometimes we get up and leave. Sometimes we sit there but our bodies wiggle and squirm and our minds go far away. This can be so uncomfortable that we feel it's impossible to stay. Yet this feeling can teach us not just about ourselves but what it is to be human ... we really don't want to stay with the nakedness of our present experience. It goes against the grain to stay present. These are the times when only gentleness and a sense of humor can give us the strength to settle down ... so whenever we wander off, we gently encourage ourselves to "stay" and settle down. Are we experiencing restlessness? Stay! Are fear and loathing out of control? Stay! Aching knees and throbbing back? Stay! What's for lunch? Stay! I can't stand this another minute! Stay!
PEMA CHODRON
The Places That Scare You
I meditate. I burn candles. I drink green tea. And I still want to smack some people.
ANONYMOUS
That is the whole art of meditation: becoming conscious of consciousness itself.
OSHO
The Book of the Books
Meditation is the womb of our actions; action the midwife of our meditations.
ARTHUR WARWICK
Spare Minutes
Meditation will give strength to our purposes. Reason is the strongest when it is most in action. Now meditation stirs up reason into act. Before, it was a standing water, which moves nothing else when itself moves not; but now it is as the speedy stream which bears down all before it.
HENRY GEORGE SALTER
The Book of Illustrations
Quiet the mind, and the soul will speak.
MA JAYA SATI BHAGAVATI
The 11 Karmic Spaces
Meditation is fathoming the Unfathomable until It reveals Itself.
KESHAVADAS
Gayatri: The Highest Meditation
Meditation takes chaos and begins magically morphing it into nothing.
MICHAEL SCOTT GALLEGOS
"Internally Strewn Selves: The 'All' Surprisingly Includes Everything", October 5, 2014
I once sat on the rim of a mesa above the Rio Grande for three days and nights, trying to have a vision. I got hungry and saw God in the form of a beef pie.
EDWARD ABBEY
"How It Was", Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside
You contemplate and you wander without any worries, between heaven and earth, in your own private world, and in this way you acquire supreme freedom.
GAO XINGJIAN
Nocturnal Wanderer
Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?
DAVID M. BADER
Zen Judaism
Without meditation we do but talk one after another like parrots, and take up things by mere hearsay, and repeat them by rote, without affection and life, or discerning the worth and excellency of what we speak. It is meditation that maketh truths always ready and present with us.
THOMAS MANTON
One Hundred and Ninety Sermons on the Hundred and Nineteenth Psalm
When the mind is silent like a lake the lotus blossoms.
AMIT RAY
Enlightenment Step by Step
The most weighty truths may strike, but without meditation cannot enter and influence the mind.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
Meditation is the cooling drink at the oasis spring for the thirsty pilgrim across the deserts of the commonplace.
GUY BOGART
The Open Court, September 1921
The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other there is a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth.
ALAN WATTS
The Essence of Alan Watts
Inventors, scientists and all who desire to accomplish big things must acquire certain habits of meditation or they cannot find the answer to the problem that is obsessing them.
WALTER MATTHEWS
"Meditation", Human Life from Many Angles
The problem with introspection is that it has no end.
PHILIP K. DICK
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Meditation means this opening out of the soul to the Divine and letting the Divine shine in without obstruction from the personal self. Therefore it means renunciation. It means throwing away everything that one has, and waiting empty for the light to come in.
ANNIE BESANT
The Building of the Kosmos
Meditation practice is like piano scales, basketball drills, ballroom dance class. Practice requires discipline; it can be tedious; it is necessary. After you have practiced enough, you become more skilled at the art form itself. You do not practice to become a great scale player or drill champion. You practice to become a musician or athlete. Likewise, one does not practice meditation to become a great meditator. We meditate to wake up and live, to become skilled at the art of living.
ELIZABETH LESSER
The Seeker's Guide