Buddhism Quotes

Usually when we hear or read something new, we just compare it to our own ideas. If it is the same, we accept it and say that it is correct. If it is not, we say it is incorrect. In either case, we learn nothing.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

The point is to be free, not to be crazy.

~ Tsoknyi Rinpoche

All beings want to be happy, yet so very few know how. It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others

~ Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness has never met a cognition it didn't like.

~ Daniel J. Siegel

Your emotional understanding about the preciousness of your human birth comes through conscious, repetitive mind training.

~ Tsoknyi Rinpoche

Remind yourself that your mental & emotional health are important.

~ Allan Lokos

Our work is not to become a better person, but to become present to the perfection we already are.

~ Allan Lokos

Patience is both the tool for and the result of, our efforts.

~ Allan Lokos

An open beginner's mind is a powerful tool for developing patience.

~ Allan Lokos

Without the ability to be present we are missing much of what the adventure has to offer.

~ Allan Lokos

There is no illness that is not exacerbated by stress.

~ Allan Lokos

A modern definition of equanimity: cool. This refers to one whose mind remains stable & calm in all situations.

~ Allan Lokos

Our actions speak for us & they speak loudly.

~ Allan Lokos

Like water poured from one vessel to another, metta flows freely, taking the shape of each situation without changing its essence.

~ Sharon Salzberg

We can understand the inherent radiance & purity of our minds by understanding metta. Like the mind, metta is not distorted by what it encounters.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Although social and personal circumstances will play their part in contributing to how an individual suffers, in Buddhist thought blame is seen as a poison that will only lead to negative actions and will do nothing to reduce suffering.

~ Desmond Biddulph

When we practice metta, we open continuously to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life.

~ Sharon Salzberg

People in the midst of losing their patience are certainly experiencing as aspect of dukkha.

~ Allan Lokos

When emotions are long held and extremely complex, it sometimes takes years for them to enter fully into awareness.

~ Sharon Salzberg

The secure attachment of Western psychology is actually akin to Buddhist non-attachment, avoid-ant attachment is the inverse of being mindful and present, and anxious attachment aligns with Buddhist notions of clinging and grasping.

~ Sharon Salzberg

I’m helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are “near enemies” to every great virtue—reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can’t possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this a “pathological empathy” of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can’t help but stay present

~ Krista Tippett

You are already the awakeness that you seek!

~ Loch Kelly

Rest as the awareness that is aware without using thought.

~ Loch Kelly

We can learn to return home to our open hearts at any moment.

~ Loch Kelly

The big realization when we go beyond the ego is simply seeing that we've always been ok.

~ Loch Kelly

Projections' - attempts to blame all and sundry for my own past folly - will be found of no avail, and we must learn to withdraw them. None other is to blame for our body, home or circumstance, our friends and enemies, our job and place in the world. We made it all; let us accept and use and better it.

~ Christmas Humphreys

Each one of us is hard at war - within. We must face this battlefield; withdraw, as the psychologist would say, our habitual projections of that strife from the world around us, and realize that we should be so busy killing the selfishness within that we really have not the time, much less the will to blow up our neighbour. And when a few more individuals recognize that the war within implies a friendly tolerance of those about one, and of their ways of living and internal fighting, the Hitlers and Stalins and even the unpleasant fellow next door may provoke in everyman a smile, rather than an H-bomb, or even a bow and arrow.

~ Christmas Humphreys

The more we explore, understand, and even come to appreciate our own self-destructive mental attitudes, the more control we gain over our minds.

~ Karuna Cayton

To take good care of ourselves, we must go back and take care of the wounded child inside of us. You have to practice going back to your wounded child every day. You have to embrace him or her terderly, like a big brother or a big sister. You have to talk to him, talk to her. And you can write a letter to the Little child in you, of two or three pages, to that you recognize his or her presence, and will do everything you can to heal his or her wounds.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

But sometimes you simply can't make yourself feel like acting. And in those situations, motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you act. By encouraging an attachment to a particular emotional state, it actually inserts an additional hurdle between you and your goal. The subtext is that if you can't make yourself feel excited and pleased about getting down to work, then you can't get down to work.

~ Oliver Burkeman

Our practice rather than being about killing the ego is about simply discovering our true nature.

~ Sharon Salzberg

People sometimes imagine that without desire there would be no enjoyment. The opposite is true. When you're caught up in craving, you never really enjoy anything very much because your mind is always pulling you on to the next desire and the next after that. When you let go of desire, then you're free to enjoy whatever is right in front of you.

~ Lorne Ladner

We find what's in our own heads.

~ T. Scott Mcleod

The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we are aware of millions of things around us - these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road - aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and calls consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world. -Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

~ Robert M. Pirsig

Next to the dragon, and connected with it, water is the most frequently used symbol in Taosim. It is the strength in apparent weakness, the fluidity of life, an also symbolic of the state of coolness of judgment, acceptance and passionlessness, as opposed to the heat of argument, the friction of opposition, and the emotion of desire. Water fertilizes, refreshes and purifies and it is symbolic of gentle persuasion in government of the state and the individual. It occupies the lowest position, yet is the most powerful of forces. The highest goodness in like water.

~ J.c. Cooper

…one lives and analyses data within a frame, unaware that the solution is most often just outside of that frame. Never underestimate the depth of your subjectivity.

~ Darrell Calkins

The venerable teachers, philosophers & spiritual practitioners throughout history have concluded that the greatest happiness we can experience comes from the development of an open, loving heart.

~ Allan Lokos

Perspective is as simple as answering this question: If I had 5 months to live would I experience this problem differently?

~ Shannon L. Alder

Forgive transgressions committed by you or others today.Only then can you have peace tomorrow.

~ Grandaddy Bad

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.

~ Gautama Buddha