Quote collection
453 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Rather than becoming more relaxed, you start pulling down the shades and locking the door. When you do go out, you find the experience more and more unsettling and disagreeable. You become touchier, more fearful, more irritable than ever. The more you try to get it your way, the less you feel at home."
"Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That’s the ground, that’s what we study, that’s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest."
"The teacher will never give up on the student no matter how mixed up he or she might be"
"If seeing that other person's pain brings up your fear or anger or confusion (which often happens), just start doing tonglen for yourself and all the other people who are stuck in the very same way."
"We sow the seeds of our future hells or happiness by the way we open or close our minds right now."
"It's also helpful to realize that this very body that we have, that's sitting right here right now... with its aches and it pleasures... is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive."
"The first noble truth of the Buddha is that when we feel suffering, it doesn’t mean that something is wrong. What a relief."
"A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us."
"Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth"
"The future is the result of what we do right now."
"The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought."
"If you have rage and righteously act it out and blame it all on others, it's really you who suffers. The other people and the environment suffer also, but you suffer more because you're being eaten up inside with rage, causing you to hate yourself more and more"
"The idea is to develop sympathy for your own confusion."
"We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things."
"That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence. Everything is in process."
"A heartfelt sense of aspiring cuts through negativity about yourself; it cuts through the heavy trips you lay on yourself."
"None of us is ever OK, but we all get through everything just fine."
"You see, there really is no separation between you and everyone else."
"In truth, there is enormous space in which to live our everyday lives."
"The Buddha’s principal message that day was that holding on to anything blocks wisdom. Any conclusion that we draw must be let go. The only way to fully understand the bodhichitta teachings, the only way to practice them fully, is to abide in the unconditional openness of the prajna, patiently cutting through all our tendencies to hang on."