Equanimity Quotes

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Sometimes people in abusive situations think they’re responsible for the other person’s happiness or that they’re going to fix them and make them feel better. The practice of equanimity teaches that it’s not all up to you to make someone else happy.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Common man's patience will bring him more happiness than common man's power.

~ Amit Kalantri

The meditative mind sees disagreeable or agreeable things with equanimity, patience, and good-will. Transcendent knowledge is seeing reality in utter simplicity. (146)

~ Jean-Yves Leloup

Compassion does not need any special preparation, place or time. You can start it anywhere and anytime. Try it at home, work, school —or anywhere! The more you cultivate compassion the more will be your fulfillment, resilience, patience, grit, endurance and equanimity.

~ Amit Ray

Without equanimity, we might give love to others only in an effort to bridge the inevitable and healthy space that always exists between two people.

~ Sharon Salzberg

There are two types of seeds in the mind: those that create anger, fear, frustration, jealousy, hatred and those that create love, compassion, equanimity and joy. Spirituality is germination and sprouting of the second group and transforming the first group.

~ Amit Ray

Equanimity is the hallmark of spirituality. It is neither chasing nor avoiding but just being in the middle.

~ Amit Ray

It is for your own good to love a dare-devil rather than a holy coward. A dare-devil is a unique devil, battling your fears, your pains, conquering your uncertainties, carrying you his arms, and flying out of the corrosive fire. The coward is a trickster serpent, which vanishes in your time of despair, and appears in time of equanimity.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Equanimity can be hard to talk about.

~ Sharon Salzberg

There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to you when you take nothing personally.

~ Miguel Ruiz

Leadership is not just some empty formulas but establishing deep connection at soul levels through service, integrity, passion, perseverance and equanimity.

~ Amit Ray

Perform all thy actions with mind concentrated on the Divine, renouncing attachment and looking upon success and failure with an equal eye. Spirituality implies equanimity.[Trans. Purohit Swami]

~ Anonymous

God said to accept whatever circumstances that come along. Circumstance is a natural thing. In it, ‘Do this and don’t do that’- should not be there. Circumstances are a ‘scientific circumstantial evidence’ [‘Vyavasthit’]. You should ‘settle them with equanimity’.

~ Dada Bhagwan

A non-religious person when awaken would make others sleep. Therefore his sleeping is good. A religious person when awaken will awaken others. Therefore his awakening is good.

~ Lord Mahavira

A non-religious prison when awaken would make others sleep. Therefore his sleeping is good. A religious person when awaken will awaken others. Therefore his awakening is good.

~ Lord Mahavira

I have heard that he who knows what is enough will not let himself be entangled by thoughts of gain, that he who really understands how to find satisfaction will not be afraid of other kinds of loss, and that he who practices the cultivation of what is within him will not be ashamed because he holds no position in society.

~ Zhuangzi

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

~ Allan Lokos

Patience is the antidote to the restless poison of the Ego. Without it we all become ego-maniacal bulls in china shops, destroying our future happiness as we blindly rush in where angels fear to tread. In these out-of-control moments, we bulldoze through the best possible outcomes for our lives, only to return to the scene of the crime later to cry over spilt milk.

~ Anthon St. Maarten

I don't purchase people with money, or hiss like a snake to attract their attention, all i do is to rest on my couch because i have the conviction that no human can progress with an exception without a power behind.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Freedom from the thinking mind is our underlying goal for most of human activity.

~ Chris Matakas

When attachment does not occur when someone gives flowers and no abhorrence occurs when someone throws stones, that is considered equanimity.

~ Dada Bhagwan

One is to cross this ocean in the form of obstinacy. We are standing on this side of obstinacy and we have to go to the other side. If someone becomes instrumental in removing your obstinacy; do not be disturbed about it, consider him to be extremely beneficial and undergo that experience with equanimity.

~ Dada Bhagwan

It is called equanimity when one has no attachment with the good (the auspicious) and no abhorrence for the bad (the inauspicious). The one without duality is in equanimity-state. In worldly interactions, people identify tolerance as equanimity!

~ Dada Bhagwan

Equanimity means that one does not do abhorrence at the time of abhorrence (generating incidents) and one does not do attachment at the time of attachment (generating incidents).

~ Dada Bhagwan

Maintaining equanimity in misery is called penance (tapa).

~ Dada Bhagwan

She grew more and more vexed with his dignified behavior. By a cruel irony, she was drawing out what was best in his disposition.

~ E.m. Forster

I sometimes marvel at how far I’ve come - blissful, even, in the knowledge that I am slowly becoming a well-evolved human being - only to have the illusion shattered by an episode of bad behaviour that contradicts the new and reinforces the old. At these junctures of self-reflection, I ask the question: “are all my years of hard work unraveling before my eyes, or am I just having an episode?” For the sake of personal growth and the pursuit of equanimity, I choose the latter and accept that, on this journey of evolution, I may not encounter just one bad day, but a group of many.

~ B.g. Bowers

He has no need for faith who knows the uncreated, who has cut off rebirth, who has destroyed any opportunity for good or evil, and cast away all desire. He is indeed the ultimate man.

~ Gautama Buddha

Don't tell a lie to be loved, speak the truth to be hated.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Life, death, preservation, loss, failure, success, poverty, riches, worthiness, unworthiness, slander, fame, hunger, thirst, cold, heat - these are the alternations of the world, the workings of fate. Day and night they change place before us, and wisdom cannot spy out their source. Therefore, they should not be enough to destroy your harmony; they should not be allowed to enter the storehouse of the spirit. If you can harmonize and delight in them, master them and never be at a loss for joy; if you can do this day and night without break and make it be spring with everything, mingling with all and creating the moment within your own mind - this is what I call being whole in power.

~ Zhuangzi

A person must be in tune with the light and dark forces of their nature and remain in harmony with the bands of their own multivariate being.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

When you are angry, your blood pressure rises, you forget the basic norms of good behavior, you start shouting, you even use foul language and dig out all the past corpses of incidents afresh to ruin your future. So, choose to remain peaceful and stable --- whatever the situation.

~ Sanchita Pandey

If a man, having lashed two hulls together, is crossing a river, and an empty boat happens along and bumps into him, no matter how hot-tempered the man may be, he will not get angry. But if there should be someone in the other boat, then he will shout out to haul this way or veer that. If his first shout is unheeded, he will shout again, and if that is not heard, he will shout a third time, this time with a torrent of curses following. In the first instance, he wasn't angry; now in the second he is. Earlier he faced emptiness, now he faces occupancy. If a man could succeed in making himself empty, and in that way wander through the world, then who could do him harm?

~ Zhuangzi

If you'd called me an ox, I'd have said I was an ox; if you'd called me a horse, I'd have said I was a horse. If the reality is there and you refuse to accept the name men give it, you'll only lay yourself open to double harassment.

~ Zhuangzi

He who has mastered the true nature of life does not labor over what life cannot do. He who has mastered the true nature of fate does not labor over what knowledge cannot change.

~ Zhuangzi

Beginners will first meditate upon equanimity. Once that is established, they will then meditate upon the remaining three [immeasurable qualities of love, compassion, and joy]....First, toward all those who are relatives, attachment is to be abandoned as though they were neutral. Then abandon aversion for enemies as though they were neutral and remain without partiality. In order to be free from delusion even toward the neutral, have the intention to dispel the passions of beings all at once. Meditate like this without cli

~ Longchen Rabjam

First, we must see that our negative actions arise due to prejudice and erroneous judgments. The discrimination that labels some as 'friends' and others as 'enemies' must be perceived as the root of our problems. We need to see that we label people and things in terms of our own desires, our own wishes. These wishes are transitory. The labeled objects are, themselves, impermanent. Such labeling is therefore very confused and false, yet it persists, and we continue to create suffering for ourselves. To avoid this, we need to develop equanimity for all beings suffering in samsara, tossed to and fro by their fleeting delusions, just like ourselves.

~ Zongtrul Losang Tsöndru

A truly brave man is ever serene; he is never taken by surprise; nothing ruffles the equanimity of his spirit. In the heat of battle he remains cool; in the midst of catastrophes he keeps level his mind. Earthquakes do not shake him, he laughs at storms. We admire him as truly great, who, in the menacing presence of danger or death, retains his self-possession; who, for instance, can compose a poem under impending peril or hum a strain in the face of death. Such indulgence betraying no tremor in the writing or in the voice, is taken as an infallible index of a large nature—of what we call a capacious mind (Yoyū), which, far from being pressed or crowded, has always room for something more.

~ Inazo Nitobe

You forget your feet when the shoes are comfortable. You forget your waist when the belt is comfortable. Understanding forgets right and wrong when the mind is comfortable. There is no change in what is inside, no following what is outside, when the adjustment to events is comfortable. You begin with what is comfortable and never experience what is uncomfortable when you know the comfort of forgetting what is comfortable.

~ Zhuangzi