Buddhism Quotes

We have two alternatives: either we question our beliefs - or we don't. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality- or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha's opinion, to train in staying open and curious - to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs - is the best use of our human lives.

~ Pema Chödrön

Rise to the challenges that life presents you. You can't develop genuine character and ability by sidestepping adversity and struggle.

~ Daisaku Ikeda

The determination to win is the better part of winning.

~ Daisaku Ikeda

People can only live fully by helping others to live. When you give life to friends you truly live. Cultures can only realize their further richness by honoring other traditions. And only by respecting natural life can humanity continue to exist.

~ Daisaku Ikeda

Through countless births in the cycle of existence I have run, not finding although seeking the builder of this house; and again and again I faced the suffering of new birth. Oh housebuilder! Now you are seen. You shall not build a house again for me. All your beams are broken, the ridgepole is shattered. The mind has become freed from conditioning: the end of craving has been reached.

~ Gautama Buddha

The virtuous man delights in this world and he delights in the next

~ Gautama Buddha

Limitations gone:Since my mind fixed on the moon,Clarity and serenityMake something for whichThere's no end in sight.

~ Saigyō

All phenomena do not inherently exist because of being dependent-arisings. All phenomena do not inherently exist because of being dependently imputed.

~ Gautama Buddha

Tightly held by rocksThrough winter, the ice todayBegins to come undone:A way-seeker also is the water,Melting, murmuring from the moss.

~ Saigyō

Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.

~ Hermann Hesse

Support the type of thinking that leads you to feeling good, peaceful & happy.

~ Allan Lokos

Of course, even when you see the world as a trap and posit a fundamental separation between liberation of self and transformation of society, you can still feel a compassionate impulse to help its suffering beings. In that case you tend to view the personal and the political in a sequential fashion. I'll get enlightened first, and then I'll engage in social action. Those who are not engaged in spiritual pursuits put it differently: I'll get my head straight first, I'll get psychoanalyzed, I'll overcome my inhibitions or neuroses or my hang-ups (whatever description you give to samsara) and then I'll wade into the fray. Presupposing that world and self are essentially separate, they imagine they can heal one before healing the other. This stance conveys the impression that human consciousness inhabits some haven, or locker-room, independent of the collective situation -- and then trots onto the playing field when it is geared up and ready.It is my experience that the world itself has a role to play in our liberation. Its very pressures, pains, and risks can wake us up -- release us from the bonds of ego and guide us home to our vast, true nature. For some of us, our love of the world is so passionate that we cannot ask it to wait until we are enlightened.

~ Joanna Macy

The buddha-dharma does not invite us to dabble in abstract notions. Rather, the task it presents us with is to attend to what we actually experience, right in this moment. You don't have to look over there. You don't have to figure anything out. You don't have to acquire anything. And you don't have to run off to Tibet, or Japan, or anywhere else. You wake up right here. In fact, you can only wake up right here.So you don't have to do the long search, the frantic chase, the painful quest. You're already right where you need to be.

~ Steve Hagen

What makes human life--which is inseparable from this moment--so precious is its fleeting nature. And not that it doesn't last but that it never returns again.

~ Steve Hagen

Salute to the Smiling Faces of the 21st Century.

~ Daisaku Ikeda

Like a lamp, dispelling the darkness of ignorance

~ Dalai Lama Xiv

Monks, even if bandits were to savagely sever you, limb by limb, with a double-handled saw, even then, whoever of you harbors ill will at heart would not be upholding my Teaching. Monks, even in such a situation you should train yourselves thus: 'Neither shall our minds be affected by this, nor for this matter shall we give vent to evil words, but we shall remain full of concern and pity, with a mind of love, and we shall not give in to hatred. On the contrary, we shall live projecting thoughts of universal love to those very persons, making them as well as the whole world the object of our thoughts of universal love — thoughts that have grown great, exalted and measureless. We shall dwell radiating these thoughts which are void of hostility and ill will.' It is in this way, monks, that you should train yourselves.

~ Gautama Buddha

Now seen...now gone,The butterfly flits in and outThrough fence-hung flowers;But a life lived so close to themI envy...though it's here and gone.

~ Saigyō

The victorious ones have saidThat emptiness is the relinquishing of all views.For whomever emptiness is a view,That one has achieved nothing.

~ Nāgārjuna

There's a limit to my patience with anything that smacks of metaphysics. I squirm at the mention of mind expansion or warm healing energy. I don't like drum circles, public nudity or strangers touching my feet.

~ Koren Zailckas

There is no miserable place waiting for you, no hell realm, sitting and waiting like Alaska—waiting to turn you into ice cream. But whatever you call it—hell or the suffering realms—it is something that you enter by creating a world of neurotic fantasy and believing it to be real. It sounds simple, but that's exactly what happens.

~ Lama Thubten Yeshe

Awakening does not mean a change in difficulty, it means a change in how those difficulties are met.

~ Mark Epstein

You don't understand. I only prostitute the part of the body that isn't important, and nobody suffers except my karma a little bit. I don't do big harm. You prostitute your mind. Mind is seat of Buddha. What you do is very very bad. You should not use your mind in that way

~ John Burdett

The way is yours for the asking - the way is yours for the taking. The way is as it should be.

~ Karen Hackel

Today's satori:Such a change of mind wouldNot exist withoutMy lifelong habit of havingMy mind immersed in blossoms.

~ Saigyō

And this is a Buddhist country?” said Matt, “This is a country of lovingkindness and compassion? Hah. I think the Americans would call this ‘tough love.’ ”“That is the paradox of Buddhism,” said Ranjit, “As a young doctor I would see these violent things and wonder why they happened, knowing that it was not something that Buddhists should do. Then I realized we are not born Buddhist. All the focus on channeling anger and dealing with hardship did not emanate from these people…. It was a lesson to these people. We are a land of Buddhists because we need to hear the lessons of Buddha, not because we follow Buddha.”-spoken by Ranjit, the surgeon, after an episode of violence....

~ Joe Niemczura

It was my letting go that gave me a better hold.

~ Chris Matakas

The possessions themselves were not the problem, it was my relationship with possessing.

~ Chris Matakas

To forgive does not mean to forget.

~ Allan Lokos

Beyond this life andThis world I'll have it tilMy heart's content:The bright moon that passed overThe horizon before I had my fill.

~ Saigyō

O let us live in joy, in love among those who hate! Among men who hate, let us live in love.

~ Anonymous

Here bhikkhus, some misguided men learn the Dhamma–discourses, stanzas, expositions, verses, exclamations, sayings, birth stories, marvels, and answers to questions–but having learned the Dhamma, they do not examine the meaning of those teachings with wisdom. Not examining the meaning of those teachings with wisdom, they do not gain a reflective acceptance of them. Instead they learn the Dhamma only for the sake of criticising others and for winning in debates, and they do not experience the good for the sake of which they learned the Dhamma.

~ Gautama Buddha

As we live out of such a mind, we become generous, with no sense of tolerance. We become patient, with no sense of putting up with anything. We become compassionate, with no sense of separation. And we become wise, with no sense of having to straighten anyone out.

~ Steve Hagen

Merchant: 'So you have lived on the possessions of others?'Saddhartha: 'Apparently. The merchant also lives on the possession of others.'Merchant: 'Well spoken...

~ Hermann Hesse

And so Gotama wandered into the town to obtain alms, and the two Samanas recognized him only by his complete peacefulness of demeanor, by the stillness of his form, in which there was no seeking, no will, no counterfeit, no effort - only light and peace.

~ Hermann Hesse

Last year, Yoshino,I walked away bending branchesTo point me to blossoms--Which now are everywhere and I canGo where I've never been before.

~ Saigyō

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description.

~ Albert Einstein

Knowing life's purpose would invest everything one did with meaning.

~ Kentetsu Takamori

The earth is black in front of the cliff, and no orchids grow.Creepers crawl in the brown mud by the path.Where did the birds of yesterday fly?To what other mountain did the animals go?Leopards and pythons dislike this ruined spot;Cranes and snakes avoid the desolation.My criminal thoughts of those days pastBrought on the disaster of today.

~ Wu Cheng'en

Every day Zuigan used to call out to himself, Master! and then he answered himself, Yes, Sir! And he added, Awake, Awake! and then answered, Yes, Sir! Yes, Sir!From now onwards, do not be deceived by others! No, Sir! I will not, Sir!

~ Wumen Huikai