Mindfulness Quotes

Stop over-thinking, put more energy on what you really want to do.

~ Amit Ray

Breathe out unwanted thoughts with your exhale and re-focus your attention directly on what is important right now, at this moment.

~ Amit Ray

Karma Yoga is mindful service to the humanity with love and respect.

~ Amit Ray

Mindful living is a conscious way of living – noticing the beauty of life in every moment.

~ Amit Ray

It's not that God, the environment, and other people cannot help us to be happy or find satisfaction. It's just that our happiness, satisfaction, and our understanding, even of God, will be no deeper than our capacity to know ourselves inwardly, to encounter the world from the deep comfort that comes from being at home in one's own skin, from an intimate familiarity with the ways of one's own mind and body.

~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

Suffering has its beneficial aspects. It can be an excellent teacher.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Mindfulness is to understand that there is a no moment left to be unhappy.

~ Amit Ray

In every bend of time there is some surprise, joy and beauty. Mindfulness is the light to discover it.

~ Amit Ray

If we turn away from our own pain, we may find ourselves projecting this aversion onto others, seeing them as somehow inadequate for being in a troubled situation.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Being a critic is easy.But if the critic tries to run the operation, he soon understands that nothing is as easy as his criticisms.Criticism without a solution is merely an inflation of the critic's ego.

~ Haemin Sunim

Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them.

~ Alan W. Watts

The overarching practice of letting go is also one of gaining resilience and insight.

~ Sharon Salzberg

Mindfulness helps us see the addictive aspect of self-criticism— a repetitive cycle of flaying ourselves again and again, feeling the pain anew.

~ Sharon Salzberg

The roots of war are in the way we live our daily lives —the way we develop our industries, build up our society, and consume goods.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Peace is based on respect for life, the spirit of reverence for life.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

If we are aware of our lifestyle, our way of consuming, of looking at things, we will know how to make peace right in the moment we are alive.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Most people treat the present moment as if it were an obstacle that they need to overcome. Since the present moment is life itself, it is an insane way to live.

~ Eckhart Tolle

Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

We wanted peace. We did not care about anyone’s victory or defeat. We just wanted the bombs to stop falling on us.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Life is the force of the absolute, the supreme, the Creator who creates everything.

~ Miguel Ruiz

Everything in existence is a manifestation of the one living being we call God. Everything is God.

~ Miguel Ruiz

When you understand, you cannot help but love. You cannot get angry.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

By identifying impermanence as a fundamental characteristic of existence itself, rather than a problem to be solved, the Buddhists are encouraging us to let go our hold on illusory solidity and learn to swim freely in the sea of change.

~ Andrew Olendzki

You are taking things far too literally. Everything you see is merely a symbol for things you do not see. Most of the people of this world are asleep in their minds.

~ Seth Adam Smith

Together with the patient, a therapist looks at the nature of the pain. Often, the therapist can uncover causes of suffering that stem from the way the patient looks at things, the beliefs he holds about himself, his culture, and the world. The therapist examines these viewpoints and beliefs with the patient, and together they help free him from the kind of prison he has been in. But the patient’s efforts are crucial. A teacher has to give birth to the teacher within his student, and a psychotherapist has to give birth to the psychotherapist within his patient. The patient’s “internal psychotherapist” can then work full-time in a very effective way.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

A wise man will know what game to play to-day, and play it. We must not be governed by rigid rules, as by the almanac, but let the season rule us. The moods and thoughts of man are revolving just as steadily and incessantly as nature's. Nothing must be postponed. Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this. Where the good husbandman is, there is the good soil. Take any other course, and life will be a succession of regrets. Let us see vessels sailing prosperously before the wind, and not simply stranded barks. There is no world for the penitent and regretful.

~ Henry David Thoreau

The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves “inside the skin” of the other.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Even if we were very good at making everything outside of ourselves be just the way we ourselves want it to be (a ludicrous thought, you must admit), we could fundamentally never get everything perfect: because our desires are always changing, because they are often conflicting, and because the changes of the environment can never keep up with the pace of the wanting mind. The satisfaction of desire as a strategy for happiness will always be a doomed enterprise.

~ Andrew Olendzki

The truth is that everything contains everything else. We cannot just be, we can only inter-be.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

We need the vision of interbeing—we belong to each other; we cannot cut reality into pieces. The well-being of “this” is the well-being of “that,” so we have to do things together. Every side is “our side”; there is no evil side.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Most of the people of this world are asleep in their minds.

~ Seth Adam Smith

Of all the nouns we use to disguise the hollowness of the human condition, none is more influential than myself. It consists of a collage of still images - name, gender, nationality, profession, enthusiasms, relationships - which are renovated from time to time, but otherwise are each a relic from one particular experience or another. The defining teaching of the Buddhist tradition, that of non-self, is merely pointing out the limitations of this reflexive view we hold of ourselves. It's not that the self does not exist, but that it is as cobbled together and transient as everything else. [With] the practice of meditation, ... we can begin to see how each artifact of the mind is raised and lowered to view, like so many flashcards. But we can also glimpse, once in a while, the sleight-of-hand shuffling the card and pulling them off the deck. Behind the objects lies a process. Self is a process. Self is a verb.

~ Andrew Olendzki

There is a lot of work ahead of us, as we endeavor to rescue the planet from ourselves, and we are likely to be at this work for a very long time. Perhaps we could come at it from the wisdom of the non-self perspective, rather than the passions of the world is mine point of view.

~ Andrew Olendzki

Mindful observation is based on the principle of “non-duality”: our feeling is not separate from us or caused merely by something outside us; our feeling is us, and for the moment we are that feeling. We are neither drowned in nor terrorized by the feeling, nor do we reject it. Our attitude of not clinging to or rejecting our feelings is the attitude of letting go[.]

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

In the West, we are very goal oriented. We know where we want to go, and we are very directed in getting there. This may be useful, but often we forget to enjoy ourselves along the route.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Western civilization places so much emphasis on the idea of hope that we sacrifice the present moment. Hope is for the future. It cannot help us discover joy, peace, or enlightenment in the present moment.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

We are too undemanding, too ready to watch whatever is on the screen, too lonely, lazy, or bored to create our own lives. We turn on the TV and leave it on, allowing someone else to guide us[.]

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Whether we are in the city, the countryside, or the wilderness, we need to sustain ourselves by choosing our surroundings carefully and nourishing our awareness in each moment.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good at living. We know how to sacrifice ten years for a diploma, and we are willing to work very hard to get a job, a car, a house, and so on. But we have difficulty remembering that we are alive in the present moment[.]

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Practicing mindfulness enables us to become a real person. When we are a real person, we see real people around us, and life is present in all its richness.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh