MEDITATION QUOTES III
quotations about meditation
Perhaps the most important thing one can discover through the practice of meditation is that the "self"--the conventional sense of being a subject, a thinker, an experiencer living inside one's head--is an illusion.
SAM HARRIS
interview, The Minimalists, August 19, 2014
When mind is still, then Truth gets her chance to be heard in the purity of the silence.
SRI AUROBINDO
Essays Divine and Human
Reading makes a full Man, Meditation a profound Man, Discourse a clear Man.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanac
Meditation on any theme, if positive and honest, inevitably separates him who does the meditating from the opinion prevailing around him, from that which ... can be called "public" or "popular" opinion.
JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET
What is Philosophy?
Meditation is the act of turning consciousness towards its own center, so that it perceives itself.
LAWRENCE GALANTE
Tai Chi
Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake. A way to discover what you love. A practice to return yourself to your body when the mind medleys threaten to usurp your sanity.
GENEEN ROTH
Women, Food and God
Finding a calm place inside myself through meditation kind of helped me to get over a lot of mental illness ... it's just been a really great thing in my life.
ROSEANNE BARR
Larry King Live, March 2, 2006
Suppose you commence right now. Drop this paper for a minute; relax your entire body, become perfectly passive and receptive. If your hands and feet want to move mentally insist that you are master of your body, and when you become perfectly still listen within for a message that may come to you; or, when you are in this state of meditation, in contact with your subconscious mind, ask for what you desire. The Scriptures say: "Believe that you have already received what you asked for and you shall receive." This is literally true.
WALTER MATTHEWS
"Meditation", Human Life from Many Angles
You are a cosmic flower. Om chanting is the process of opening the psychic petals of that flower.
AMIT RAY
Om Chanting & Meditation
Be master OF mind rather than mastered BY mind.
JAPANESE PROVERB
By meditation I mean not merely thinking; for that may be a wrestling with problems of philosophy, or of physics, or of affairs. Still less I mean abstraction of mind; for one may be drowned in dreams, by day or by night. There is an intent revelry of the mind which yet no more is meditation than riddles are studies, or games labor. Meditation is a strong and quiet attention of the mind to high and noble ideas. This definition states two qualities. Meditation is first quietness. We live in a great din. It is well to see (for who sees it not will have but narrow sympathies and understand little that occurs around him) that the noise is often a noble uproar, "deep calling unto deep," the clamor of wonderful machinery, of great labors, of human struggles, of heroes' voices. But storms, though grand, must sink if the sea is to show the stars. Meditation, secondly, must be power of will and strength of attention, being like a flight to great heights wherein wings must be plied hard though joyfully.
JAMES VILA BLAKE
"Of Meditation", Essays
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
"The Decay of Meditation"
From beginningless time you have been under the control of your mind; your mind has not been under your control. Furthermore, your mind tended to be obscured by the afflictions and so forth. Thus meditation aims to bring this mind, which gives rise to all faults and flaws, under control and then it aims to make it serviceable.
JE TSONGKHAPA
The Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment
Life is a dance. Mindfulness is witnessing that dance.
AMIT RAY
Mindfulness Living in the Moment
Meditation is not something that you do--meditation happens like a gift of grace.
PATRICIA MONAGHAN
Meditation: The Complete Guide
Meditation is an abstraction of attention from one's self, to fix it entirely on God, it is the will insisting on His reality.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
The Origin and Development of Religious Belief: Christianity
Thy thoughts to nobler meditations give,
And study how to die, not how to live.
GEORGE GRANVILLE
Meditations on Death
Meditation ... puts into question more or less everything you tend to do in your search for happiness. But if you lose sight of this, it can become just another strategy for seeking happiness--a more refined version of the problem you already have.
SAM HARRIS
Taming the Mind
Meditation is simply being able to remain present.
DAVID FILABER
Transform Your Life with Meditation
Labor, but slight not meditation; meditate, but slight not labor.
CONFUCIUS
attributed, Day's Collacon