Quote collection
628 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"To concentrate implies bringing all your energy to focus on a certain point; but thought wanders away... Whereas attention has no control, no concentration. It is complete attention, which means giving all your energy, the energy of the brain, your heart, everything, to attending."
"Hasn't knowledge only crippled me from seeing truth? Is knowledge itself illusory?"
"Awareness is that state of mind which takes in everything-the crows flying across the sky, the flowers on the trees, the people sitting in front, the colors they are wearing - being extensively aware, which needs watching, observing, taking in the shape of the leaf, the shape of the trunk, the shape of the head of another, what he is doing."
"Am I caught in a self-centred, narrow little cell which refuses to look beyond? Do I see it when you come along and tell me that my brain is the brain of all mankind?"
"Instead of old spiritual distinctions you have new spiritual distinctions, instead of old worships you have new worships. You are all depending for your spirituality on someone else, for your happiness on someone else, for your enlightenment on someone else."
"A mind that is afraid withers away; it cannot function properly."
"My discord must be different from yours; my revolt must not be the same thing as yours. It will not be a revolt if it is moulding itself around your revolt."
"What has validity is your living, not what happens tomorrow."
"The idea, the pattern, is self-projected; it is a form of self-worship, of self-perpetuation, and hence gratifying."
"We are asking a really fundamental question whether thought can ever be creative. If thought is not the ground of creation then what is creation? Is love the only factor that is creative?"
"Religion becomes a matter of belief, and belief acts as a limitation on the mind; and the mind then is never free."
"Is insight dependent on a material process? Has insight a cause?"
"If you have this extraordinary thing going in your life, then it is everything; then you become the teacher, the disciple, the neighbour, the beauty of the cloud - you are all that, and that is love."
"The description is not the described."
"There is always great beauty, not of images, feeling or thought. Beauty is neither thought nor feeling; it has nothing whatsoever to do with emotion or sentiment. There is fear. Fear is never an actuality; it is either before or after the active present. When there is fear in the active present, is it fear? It is there and there is no escape from it, no evasion possible. There, at that actual moment, there is total attention at the moment of danger, physical or psychological."
"Learning implies a mind that doesn't know."
"Can I reject everything my brain experienced? Is intellectual understanding any understanding at all?"
"The very word "sorrow" colours the fact of sorrow, the pain of it."
"Why does the brain retain the memory of the hurt from yesterday?"
"It is important to understand, not intellectually but actually in your daily life, how you have built images about your wife, your husband, your neighbor, your child, your country, your leaders, your politicians, your gods-you have nothing but images. The images create the space between you and what you observe and in that space there is conflict, so what we are going to find out now together is whether it is possible to be free of the space we create, not only outside ourselves but in ourselves, the space which divides people in all their relationships."