Week 2022-17: Thich Nhat Hanh - Collected Quotes

"You cannot transmit wisdom and insight to another person. The seed is already there. A good teacher touches the seed, allowing it to wake up, to sprout, and to grow." (Thich Nhat Hanh, "Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children", 2007)

"Are you able to understand the suffering in the other person?" (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Be mindful 24 hours a day, not just during the one hour you may allot for formal meditation or reading scripture and reciting prayers. Each act must be carried out in mindfulness." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Be yourself.
 Life is precious as it is.
All the elements for your happiness are already here.
There is no need to run, strive, search or struggle.
Just Be." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Breathing in, I calm body and mind. Breathing out, I smile. 
Dwelling in the present moment I know this is the only moment."" (Thich Nhat Hanh)"

"Eating mindfully is a most important practice of meditation. We can eat in a way that we restore the cookie of our childhood. The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Every path, every street in the world is your walking meditation path." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Every thought you produce, anything you say, any action you do, it bears your signature." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Everyone has a desire, but the desire to transform oneself, to transform one’s affliction, suffering, in order to get free and help other people, and change the world, that is a good desire." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our view about them." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Freedom is possible. One in-breath alone is enough to set you free - from your regrets about the past, your worries about the future, and your projects in the present. In that state of freedom, you will make better decisions. Next time you have to make a decision, be sure to breathe in and out first." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"If we are not fully ourselves, truly in the present moment, we miss everything." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive - that you can touch the miracle of being alive ~ then that is a kind of enlightenment." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"If you know how to practice mindfulness you can generate peace and joy right here, right now. And you'll appreciate that and it will change you. In the beginning, you believe that if you cannot become number one, you cannot be happy, but if you practice mindfulness you will readily release that kind of idea. We need not fear that mindfulness might become only a means and not an end because in mindfulness the means and the end are the same thing. There is no way to happiness; happiness is the way." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Listening is a very deep practice. [...].You have to empty yourself. You have to leave space in order to listen [...] especially to people we think are our enemies - the ones we believe are making our situation worse. When you have shown your capacity for listening and understanding, the other person will begin to listen to you, and you have a change to tell him or her of your pain, and it’s your turn to be healed. This is the practice of peace." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Looking deeply into the wrong perceptions, ideas, and notions that are at the base of our suffering is the most important practice in Buddhist meditation." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Many people think excitement is happiness.... But when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Meditation is not meant to help us avoid problems or run away from difficulties. It is meant to allow positive healing to take place. To meditate is to learn how to stop - to stop being carried away by our regrets about the past, our anger or despair in the present, or our worries about the future." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Meditation is not passive sitting in silence. It is sitting in awareness, free from distraction, and realizing the clear understanding that arises from concentration." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Meditation is offering your genuine presence to yourself in every moment." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Meditation is, first of all, a tool for surveying our territory so we can know what is going on. With the energy of mindfulness, we can calm things down, understand them, and bring harmony back to the conflicting elements inside us." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Our own life has to be our message." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong. Why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"People say that walking on water is a miracle, but to me, walking peacefully on earth is the real miracle.” (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"People suffer because they are caught in their views. As soon as we release those views, we are free and we don't suffer anymore." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Silence is something that comes from your heart, not from outside. Silence doesn't mean not talking and not doing things; it means that you are not disturbed inside. If you’re truly silent, then no matter what situation you find yourself in you can enjoy the silence." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"The first miracle brought about by mindfulness is your own presence, your real presence. With this energy dwelling in you, you become completely alive. When the energy of mindfulness is dwelling in you, Buddha is dwelling in you. The energy of mindfulness is the energy of Buddha. It is the equivalent of the Holy Spirit. Where the Holy Spirit is, there is also understanding, life, healing, and compassion."  (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"The mind can go in a thousand directions, but on this beautiful path, I walk in peace. With each step, the wind blows. With each step, a flower blooms." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"The moment of awakening may be marked by an outbursts of laughter, but this is not the laughter of someone who has won the lottery or some kind of victory. It is the laughter of one who, after searching for something for a long time, suddenly finds it in the pocket of their coat." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"The next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community; a community practising understanding and loving kindness, a community practising mindful living. This may be the most important thing we can do for the survival of the earth." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"The source of love is deep in us and we can help others realise a lot of happiness. One word, one action, one thought, can reduce another person's suffering and bring that person joy." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"There are many ways to calm a negative energy without suppressing or fighting it. You recognize it, you smile to it, and you invite something nicer to come up and replace it; you read some inspiring words, you listen to a piece of beautiful music, you go somewhere in nature, or you do some walking meditation." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"To dwell in the here and now does not mean you never think about the past or responsibly plan for the future. The idea is simply to not allow yourself to get lost in regret about the past or worries about the future." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"We are all connected. When you touch one thing, you are touching everything. Whatever we do has an effect on others. Therefore, we must learn to live mindfully to touch the peace inside each of us. Peace in the world starts with peace in oneself. If everyone lives mindfully, everyone will be more healthy, feel more fulfilled in their daily lives and there will be more peace. This collective mindfulness can bring positive change to our families, organizations, communities, nations and future generations." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"We're here to awaken from the illusion of separateness." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That's the message he is sending." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"When we look deeply into the heart of a flower, we see clouds, sunshine, minerals, time, the earth, and everything else in the cosmos in it. Without clouds there could be no rain, and without rain there would be no flower." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"When you learn HOW to suffer, you suffer much less." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there?" (Thich Nhat Hanh)"

"When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer or more water or less sun. You never blame the lettuce." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Where mindfulness is, true life, solidity, freedom, and healing also manifest. We all have the ability to generate this energy of mindfulness. Do walking meditation, breathe mindfully, drink your tea mindfully, and cultivate this energy that dwells in you, that illuminates you, and makes life possible." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"You are like a candle. Imagine you are sending light out all around you. All your words, thoughts and actions are going in many directions. If you say something kind, your kind words go in many directions, and you yourself go with them. We are …transforming and continuing in a different form at every moment." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Be yourself. Life is precious as it is. All the elements for your happiness are already here. There is no need to run, strive, search or struggle. Just Be." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

Week 2022-15: Adyashanti - Collected Quotes

"The unknown, our own true nature, has the capacity to wake itself up when you start to fall in love with letting go of all the mental structures you hold onto. Contemplate this: there is no such thing as a true belief." (Steven Gray [Adyashanti], "Emptiness Dancing" , 2004)

"The mind is something that happens within you. Thinking is something that happens within what you are. Thinking does not define what you are. Thinking doesn't define anything." (Adyashanti, "The Basic Teachings - Part 1: Principles of the Teaching", 2009)

"Perhaps the most important element of any spiritual teaching is what we bring to it, because this dictates what the teaching will reveal within ourselves." (Adyashanti, "Orientation to the Teaching", 2010)

"All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit is to stop seeking something more or better or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are." (Adyashanti)

"And it is from the sacred that a new and fluid consciousness is born that wipes away the old and brings to life the flowering of a living and undivided expression of being. Such an expression is neither personal nor impersonal, neither spiritual nor worldly, but rather the flow and flowering of existence beyond all notions of self." (Adyashanti)

"Enlightenment is a destructive process. it has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true." (Adyashanti)

"Meditation is a dress rehearsal for death." (Adyashanti)

"Meditation is a teaching which offers you the possibility of breaking free from the egoic consciousness and coming into a whole new realisation of who and what you truly are. And all this starts with the willingness to question. To pause for just a moment and realise that maybe you aren't who you imagine yourself to be." (Adyashanti)

"One must be willing to stand alone - in the unknown, with no reference to authority or the past or any of one's conditioning. One must stand where no one has stood before in complete nakedness, innocence, and humility." (Adyashanti)

"Our potential is something that can flower only when we are no longer caught within the influence and limitations of the known. Beyond the realm of the mind, beyond the limitations of humanity’s conditioned consciousness, lies that which can be called the sacred." (Adyashanti)

"True Meditation is the space in which everything gets revealed, everything gets seen, everything gets experienced. And as such, it lets go of itself. We don't even let go. It lets go of itself." (Adyashanti)

"Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them, or to see things differently - until you have given the whole world its freedom - you'll never have your freedom." (Adyashanti)

"We realize - often quite suddenly - that our sense of self, which has been formed and constructed out of our ideas, beliefs and images, is not really who we are. It doesn't define us, it has no center. [...] The way they perceive the world suddenly changes, and they find themselves without any sense of separation between themselves and the rest of the world." (Adyashanti)

"When you rest in quietness and your image of yourself fades, and your image of the world fades, and your ideas of others fade, what's left? A brightness, a radiant emptiness that is simply what you are." (Adyashanti)

Week 2022-14: Jon Kabat-Zinn - Collected Quotes

"If we are honest with ourselves, most of us will have to admit that we live out our lives in an ocean of fear." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Full Catastrophe Living", 1990)

"Acknowledging that sometimes, often at very crucial times, you really have no idea where you are going or even where the path lies. At the same time, you can very well know something about where you are now (even if it is knowing that you are lost, confused, enraged or without hope)." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"But you cannot have harmony without a commitment to ethical behavior. It's the fence that keeps out the goats that will eat all the young shoots in your garden." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"Concentration is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. Without calmness, the mirror of mindfulness will have an agitated and choppy surface and will not be able to reflect things with any accuracy." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?" (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It's about feeling the way you feel." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is. It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely, the path that is your life. Meditation may help us see that this path we call our life has direction; that it is always unfolding, moment by moment; and that what happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"Perhaps the most 'spiritual' thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"Perhaps ultimately, spiritual simply means experiencing wholeness and interconnectedness directly, a seeing that individuality and the totality are interwoven, that nothing is separate or extraneous. If you see in this way, then everything becomes spiritual in its deepest sense. Doing science is spiritual. So is washing the dishes." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"See for yourself whether letting go when a part of you really wants to hold on doesn't bring a deeper satisfaction than clinging." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"Stillness, insight, and wisdom arise only when we can settle into being complete in this moment, without having to seek or hold on to or reject anything." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"We call the effort to cultivate our ability to be in the present moment 'practice' or 'meditation practice'." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"We must be willing to encounter darkness and despair when they come up and face them, over and over again if need be, without running away or numbing ourselves in the thousands of ways we conjure up to avoid the unavoidable." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"Mindfulness means moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness. It is cultivated by refining our capacity to pay attention, intentionally, in the present moment, and then sustaining that attention over time as best we can. In the process, we become more in touch with our life as it is unfolding." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting", 1997)

"Healing is a coming to terms with things as they are, rather than struggling to force them to be as they once were, or as we would like them to be, to feel secure or to have what we sometimes think of as our own way." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness", 2007)

"It is indeed a radical act of love just to sit down and be quiet for a time by yourself." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Arriving at Your Own Door: 108 Lessons in Mindfulness", 2007)

"Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now." (Jon Kabat-Zinn)

"The real meditation is how you live your life." (Jon Kabat-Zinn)

"When we let go of wanting something else to happen in this moment, we are taking a profound step toward being able to encounter what is here now. If we hope to go anywhere or develop ourselves in any way, we can only step from where we are standing. If we don't really know where we are standing—a knowing that comes directly from the cultivation of mindfulness - we may only go in circles, for all our efforts and expectations. So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all." (Jon Kabat-Zinn)

"You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf" (Jon Kabat-Zinn)

Week 2022-13: Alan Watts - Collected Quotes

"At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die, but do not seem to make a 'problem' of it." (Alan Watts)

"Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world - a place where they are one." (Alan Watts)

"Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent... this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering." (Alan Watts)

"Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes them tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know." (Alan Watts)

"I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said, 'That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen, you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation." (Alan Watts)

"I have realized that the past and the future are real illusions, that they exist only in the present, which is what there is and all that there is." (Alan Watts)

"I simply feel that a human being must always recognize that he is qualitatively more than any system of thought he can imagine, and therefore he should never label himself. He degrades himself when he does." (Alan Watts)

"If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it." (Alan Watts)

"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dewdrop contains the reflection of all the other dewdrops. And, in each reflected dewdrop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image." (Alan Watts)

"It has been said that the highest wisdom lies in detachment, or, in words of Chuang-tzu: 'The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror; it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.' In short, it is to be detached from both past and future and to live in the eternal NOW. For in truth neither past nor future have any existence apart from this NOW; by themselves they are illusions. Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists for ever." (Alan Watts)

"Life is not a problem to be solved, 
nor a question to be answered. 
 Life is a mystery to be experienced." (Alan Watts)

"Our sense of individualismthat each of us is alone and separateis a culturally implanted hallucination." (Alan Watts)

"The art of meditation is neither mindless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive." (Alan Watts)

"The future is a concept - it doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That’s one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now." (Alan Watts)

"The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around; the real, deep down you is the whole universe." (Alan Watts)

"The transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather than unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, ‘The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day.'" (Alan Watts)

"This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play." (Alan Watts)

"This - the immediate, everyday, and present experience—is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe." (Alan Watts)

"Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence." (Alan Watts)

"To discover the ultimate Reality of life- the Absolute, the eternal, God - you must cease to try to grasp it in the forms of idols. These idols are not just crude images. [...] They are our beliefs, our cherished preconceptions of the truth, which block the unreserved opening of mind, and heart to reality. The legitimate use of images is to express the truth, not to possess it." (Alan Watts)

"To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give; no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane.” (Alan Watts)

"You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean." (Alan Watts)

The way an ecologist describes human behavior is that an action - what you do - is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now. You are something that the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing. [...] The Real You is not a puppet which life pushes around; the real, deep down You IS the Whole Universe." (Alan Watts)

"Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be." (Alan Watts)

Week 2022-12: Ram Dass - Collected Quotes

"Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery." (Ram Dass)

"If you think you are so enlighted go and spend a week with your parents." (Ram Dass)

"Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them." (Ram Dass)

"It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed. The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back." (Ram Dass)

"Meditation means to be constantly extricating yourself from the clinging of mind. By letting go of even the thought ‘I,’ and 'me' what is left? There is nowhere to stand and no one to stand there. No separation anywhere. Pure awareness. Neither this, nor that. Just clarity and being." (Ram Dass)

"Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we're so deeply interconnected with one another."

"The quieter you become, the more you can hear." (Ram Dass , "Love Serve Remember")

"The resistance to the unpleasant situation is the root of suffering." (Ram Dass and Paul Gorman)

"We're all just walking each other home." (Ram Dass)

"Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is the supreme creative act." (Ram Dass)

"Your problem is you're ... too busy holding onto your unworthiness." (Ram Dass)

Week 2022-11: Eckhart Tolle - Collected Quotes

"When you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in." (Eckhart Tolle, "The Power of Now", 1997)

"A genuine relationship is one that is not dominated by the ego with its image-making and self-seeking. In a genuine relationship, there is an outward flow of open, alert attention toward the other person in which there is no wanting whatsoever." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Accept – then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, a subtle energy vibration, is consciousness." (Eckhart Tolle)

"All the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace ~ arise from beyond the mind." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Always say 'yes' to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? what could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say 'yes' to life - and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Am I aware not only of what is happening at this moment, but also of the Now itself as the living timeless inner space in which everything happens?" (Eckhart Tolle)

"Any action is often better than no action, especially if you have been stuck in an unhappy situation for a long time. If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it’s no longer a mistake. If you remain stuck, you learn nothing." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Anything that you resent and strongly react to in another is also in you." (Eckhart Tolle)

"As long as the ego runs your life, most of your thoughts, emotions, and actions arise from desire and fear." (Eckhart Tolle)

"As soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out the present-moment awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality, care, and love – even the most simple action." (Eckhart Tolle)

"As you go more deeply into this realm of no-mind, this sense of your own presence, you realize the state of pure consciousness. In that state, you feel your own presence with such intensity and such joy that all thinking, all emotions, your physical body and the whole external world become relatively insignificant in comparison to it. A new dimension of consciousness has come in. And yet this is not a selfish but a selfless state. It takes you beyond what you previously thought of as 'your self'." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Authentic human interactions become impossible when you lose yourself in a role." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Be at least as interested in what goes on inside you as what happens outside. If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Be aware of your breathing as often as you are able, whenever you remember. Do that for one year, and it will be more powerfully transformative than attending all of these courses. And it's free." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness." (Eckhart Tolle)

"By far the greater part of violence that humans have inflicted on each other is not the work of criminals or the mentally deranged, but of normal, respectable citizens in the service of the collective ego." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Boredom, anger, sadness, or fear are not ‘yours,’ not personal. They are conditions of the human mind. They come and go. Nothing that comes and goes is you." (Eckhart Tolle)

"By knowing yourself as the awareness in which phenomenal existence happens, you become free of dependency on phenomena and free of self seeking in situations, places, and conditions. In other words, what happens or doesn't happen is not that important any more. Things lose their heaviness, their seriousness. A playfulness comes into your life. You recognize this world as a cosmic dance, the dance of form." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Desire is the need to add something to yourself in order to be yourself more fully. All fear is the fear of losing something and thereby becoming diminished and being less." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Defining yourself through thought is limiting yourself." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Don’t let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Don’t Seek Happiness. If you seek it, you won’t find it, because seeking is the antithesis of happiness." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Every addiction arises from an unconscious refusal to face and move through your own pain. Every addiction starts with pain and ends with pain. Whatever the substance you are addicted to – alcohol, food, legal or illegal drugs, or a person – you are using something or somebody to cover up your pain." (Eckhart Tolle)

"For what you do to others, you do to yourself." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Forget about your life situation and pay attention to your life. Your life situation exists in time. Your life is now. Your life situation is mind~stuff. Your life is real." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Give up defining yourself – to yourself or to others. You won’t die. You will come to life. And don’t be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it’s their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don’t be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Humanity is now faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. … If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction." (Eckhart Tolle)

"How wonderful to go beyond wanting and fearing in your relationships. Love does not want or fear anything." (Eckhart Tolle)

"I am the awareness that is aware that there is attachment." (Eckhart Tolle)

"I cannot tell you any spiritual truth that deep within you don't know already. All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten. Living knowledge, ancient and yet ever new, is then activated and released from within you." (Eckhart Tolle)

"I just cannot live with myself any longer. [...] If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self ’ that ‘I’ cannot live with." (Eckhart Tolle , "The Power of Now")

"Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate 'other'. You then forget the essential fact that, underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is." (Eckhart Tolle)

"If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn’t even know you are thinking. You would be like a dreamer who doesn’t know he is dreaming. When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream. (Eckhart Tolle)

"If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within; secondary reality without." (Eckhart Tolle)

"If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that’s just more ego." (Eckhart Tolle)

"In essence, you are neither inferior nor superior to anyone. True self-esteem and true humility arise out of that realization. In the eyes of the ego, self-esteem and humility are contradictory. In truth, they are one and the same." (Eckhart Tolle)

"In today’s rush we all think too much, seek too much, want too much and forget about the joy of just Being." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace? Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not." (Eckhart Tolle)

"It has been said 'God is love' but that is not absolutely correct. God is the One Life in and beyond the countless forms of life. Love implies duality: lover and beloved, subject and object. so love is the recognition of oneness in the world of duality. This is the birth of God into the world of form. Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Life isn't as serious as the mind makes it out to be." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not selective. It does not make one person special. It is not exclusive. Exclusivity is not the love of God but the "love" of ego. However, the intensity with which true love is felt can vary. There may be one person who reflects your love back to you more clearly and more intensely than others, and if that person feels the same toward you, it can be said that you are in a love relationship with him or her. The bond that connects you with that person is the same bond that connects you with the person sitting next to you on a bus, or with a bird, a tree, a flower. Only the degree of intensity with which it is felt differs." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Living up to an image that you have of yourself or that other people have of you is inauthentic living." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Love is a state of Being. Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Money can activate the painbody and cause complete unconsciousness." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?" (Eckhart Tolle)

"Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize that truth. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they will also give you pain. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you joy. Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of Being. It is an essential part of the inner state of peace, the state that has been called the peace of God. It is your natural state, not something that you need to work hard for or struggle to attain." (Eckhart Tolle)

"On a deeper level you are already complete. When you realize that, there is a joyous energy behind what you do." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Once you have identified with some form of negativity, you do not want to let it go, and on a deeply unconscious level, you do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry or hard-done by person. You will then ignore, deny or sabotage the positive in your life. This is a common phenomenon. It is also insane." (Eckhart Tolle)

"People don’t realize that now is all there ever is; there is no past or future except as memory or anticipation in your mind." (Eckhart Tolle)

"People tend to dwell more on negative things than on good things. So the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.True power if within, and it is available to you now." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Spiritual Awakening is awakening from the dream of thought." (Eckhart Tolle)

"The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not 'the thinker'. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace – arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken." (Eckhart Tolle)

"The ego isn’t wrong; it’s just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it." (Eckhart Tolle)

"The ego tends to equate having with Being: I have, therefore I am. And the more I have, the more I am. The ego lives through comparison. How you are seen by others turns into how you see yourself." (Eckhart Tolle)

"The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me." (Eckhart Tolle)

"The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over." (Eckhart Tolle)

"The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer. Or you may put it like this: the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering - and free of the egoic mind." (Eckhart Tolle)

"[...] the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions." (Eckhart Tolle)

"The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it." (Eckhart Tolle)

"There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time - past and future - the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is." (Eckhart Tolle)

"To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness." (Eckhart Tolle)

"To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Thinking and consciousness are not synonymous. Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought." (Eckhart Tolle)

"To be aware of little, quiet things, you need to be quiet inside. A high degree of alertness is required. Be still. Look. Listen. Be present." (Eckhart Tolle)

"To be identified with your mind is to be trapped in time: the compulsion to live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation. This creates an endless preoccupation with past and future and an unwillingness to honor and acknowledge the present moment and allow it to be. The compulsion arises because the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions." (Eckhart Tolle)

"To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for thousands of years, you have to start with yourself and take responsibility for your inner state at any given moment. That means now." (Eckhart Tolle)

"To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them – while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease." (Eckhart Tolle)

"True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found." (Eckhart Tolle)

"What you react to in others, you strengthen in yourself." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the Being that it cannot feel. You can value and care for things, but whenever you get attached to them, you will know it’s the ego. And you are never really attached to a thing but to a thought that has ‘I,’ ‘me,’ or ‘mine’ in it. Whenever you completely accept a loss, you go beyond ego, and who you are, the I Am which is consciousness itself, emerges." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Whatever the present moment contains, accept is as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Whatever you fight, you strengthen, and what you resist, persists." (Eckhart Tolle)

"When you no longer believe everything you think, you step out of thought and see clearly that the thinker is not who you are." (Eckhart Tolle)"

"When your attention moves into the Now, there is an alertness. It is as if you were waking up from a dream, the dream of thought, the dream of past and future. Such clarity, such simplicity. No room for problem-making. Just this moment as it is." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Whenever an answer, a solution, or a creative idea is needed, stop thinking for a moment by focusing attention on your inner energy field. [...] When you resume thinking, it will be fresh and creative." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Whenever you become anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over, and you lost sight of your inner purpose. You have forgotten that your state of consciousness is primary, all else secondary." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Where does all that unhappiness come from?" (Eckhart Tolle)

"Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Within every situation is contained a seed of grace. Acceptance of the unacceptable is the greatest source of grace in this world." (Eckhart Tolle)

"Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose." (Eckhart Tolle)

"You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold." (Eckhart Tolle)

"You are the universe, expressing itself as a human for a little while." (Eckhart Tolle)

"You cannot be both unhappy and fully present in the Now." (Eckhart Tolle)

"You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You can find yourself by coming into the present." (Eckhart Tolle)

"You don’t need to condemn. Just observe, That is sin. That is insanity. That is unconsciousness. Above all, don’t forget to observe your own mind. Seek out the root of the insanity there." (Eckhart Tolle)

"You get there by realizing you are already there." (Eckhart Tolle)

Week 2022-10: Rudolf Steiner - Collected Quotes

"In thinking, we have that element given us which welds our separate individuality into one whole with the cosmos." (Rudolf Steiner, "The Philosophy of Freedom: The Basis for a Modern World Conception", 1894)

"It is owing to our limitations that a thing appears to us as single and separate when in truth it is not a separate thing at all." (Rudolf Steiner, "The Philosophy of Freedom: The Basis for a Modern World Conception", 1894)

"The smallest thing in its rightful place can lead to the highest goals." (Rudolf Steiner, "Rosicrucian Wisdom", 1907)

"When the past has taught us that we have more within us than we have ever used, our prayer is a cry to the divine to come to us and fill us with its power." (Rudolf Steiner, "Paths of Experience", 1934)

"Man is effective in the world not only through what he does, but above all through what he is." (Rudolf Steiner, "Study of Man", 1948)

"Truth is a free creation of the human spirit, that never would exist at all if we did not generate it ourselves. The task of understanding is not to replicate in conceptual form something that already exists, but rather to create a wholly new realm, that together with the world given to our senses constitutes the fullness of reality." (Rudolf Steiner, "Truth and Knowledge", 1963)

"You'll be able to gain insight and reach a conclusion only by applying the powers of mind, intellect, soul, heart, spirit, and imagination. This is what 'looking at something spiritually' really means." (Rudolf Steiner, "Bees", 1982)

"Beauty is not the divine in a cloak of physical reality; no, it is physical reality in a cloak that is divine. The artist does not bring the divine on to the earth by letting it flow into the world; he raises the world into the sphere of the divine." (Rudolf Steiner, "Art: An Introductory Reader", 2003)

"He who would know the world, seek first within his being’s depth; he who would truly know himself, develop interest in the world." (Rudolf Steiner)

"Heights of the spirit can only be climbed by passing through the portals of humility." (Rudolf Steiner)

"If we do not believe within ourselves this deeply rooted feeling that there is something higher than ourselves, we shall never find the strength to evolve into something higher." (Rudolf Steiner)

"Just as the human soul takes leave of the body... one can truly see in the flying swarm an image of the departing human soul." (Rudolf Steiner)

"Nor it is an objection to say that we must understand a prayer if it is to have its true effect. That simply is not the case. Who understands the wisdom of a flower? Yet we can take pleasure in it." (Rudolf Steiner)

"The outer world, with all its phenomena, is filled with divine splendour, but we must have experienced the divine within ourselves, before we can discover it in our environment." (Rudolf Steiner)

"To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world." (Rudolf Steiner)

"What may be trivial and commonplace to the understanding is infinitely deep and sublime to the human heart." (Rudolf Steiner)

"When we raise ourselves through meditation to what unites us with the spirit, we quicken something within us that is eternal and unlimited by birth and death. Once we have experienced this eternal part in us, we can no longer doubt its existence. Meditation is thus the way to knowing and beholding the eternal, indestructible, essential center of our being." (Rudolf Steiner)

Week 2022-09: Maxwell Maltz - Collected Quotes

"A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"An idea accepted as true from any source can be every bit as powerful as hypnosis." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"Change your mental imagery, and the feelings will take care of themselves." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"Develop an enthusiasm for life, create a need for more life, and you will receive more life." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"For imagination sets the goal picture which our automatic mechanism works on. We act, or fail to act, not because of will, as is so commonly believed, but because of imagination." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"Happiness is native to the human mind and its physical machine. We think better, perform better, feel better, and are healthier when we are happy." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"Happiness is simply a state of mind in which our thinking is pleasant a good share of the time." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"If you wait until circumstances justify your thinking pleasant thoughts, you are likely to wait forever." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"Mental pictures offer us an opportunity to practice new traits and attitudes, which otherwise we could not do. This is possible because again - your nervous system cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and one that is vividly imagined." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"The ‘self-image’ is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"True success and true happiness not only go together but each other enhances the other." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"Visualizing, creative mental picturing, is no more difficult than what you do when you remember some scene out of the past, or worry about the future. Acting out new action patterns is no more difficult than deciding, then following through on tying your shoes in a new and different manner each morning, instead of continuing to tie them in your old habitual way, without thought or decision." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"We are built to conquer environment, solve problems, achieve goals, and we find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"We are engineered as goal-seeking mechanisms. We are built that way. When we have no personal goal which we are interested in and which 'means something' to us, we are apt to 'go around in circles,' 'feel lost' and find life itself 'aimless' and 'purposeless'." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"When you're not goal-striving, not looking forward, you're not really living." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than ‘you’ ever could by conscious thought. 'You’ supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"One of the reasons it has seemed so difficult for a person to change his habits, his personality, or his way of life, has been that heretofore nearly all efforts at change have been directed to the circumference of the self, so to speak, rather than to the center." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-cybernetics: Updated And Expanded", 2015)

"The self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment. It defines what you can and cannot do. Expand the self-image and you expand the “area of the possible.” The development of an adequate, realistic self-image will seem to imbue the individual with new capabilities, new talents, and literally turn failure into success." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-cybernetics: Updated And Expanded", 2015)

"If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone." (Maxwell Maltz)

"We must have courage to bet on our ideas, on the calculated risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness." (Maxwell Maltz)

"What is opportunity, and when does it knock? It never knocks. You can wait a whole lifetime, listening, hoping, and you will hear no knocking. None at all. You are opportunity, and you must knock on the door leading to your destiny. You prepare yourself to recognize opportunity, to pursue and seize opportunity as you develop the strength of your personality, and build a self-image with which you are able to live with your self-respect alive and growing." (Maxwell Maltz)

"You may live in an imperfect world but the frontiers are not closed and the doors are not all shut." (Maxwell Maltz)

Week 2022-08: Sun Tzu - Collected Quotes

"A leader leads by example not by force." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"After that, comes tactical maneuvering, than which there is nothing more difficult. The difficulty of tactical maneuvering consists in turning the devious into the direct, and misfortune into gain." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"And if we are able thus to attack an inferior force with a superior one, our opponents will be in dire straits." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"Fighting with a large army under your command is nowise different from fighting with a small one; it is merely a question of instituting signs and signals." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"Gongs and drums, banners and flags, are means whereby the ears and eyes of the host may be focused on one particular point." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"Having collected an army and concentrated his forces, he must blend and harmonize the different elements thereof before pitching his camp." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"He will conquer who has learned the artifice of deviation. Such is the art of maneuvering." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"He wins his battles by making no mistakes. Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"Hence in the wise leader’s plans, considerations of advantage and disadvantage will be blended together." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"In respect of the military method, we have, firstly, Measurement; secondly, Estimation of quantity; thirdly, Calculation; fourthly Balancing of chances; fifthly, Victory." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"In war, the general receives his command from the sovereign." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"Knowing the place and the time of the coming battle, we may concentrate from the greatest distances in order to fight." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"Knowing yourself and knowing your enemy clearly, you can win all the time." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"Management of many is the same as management of few. It is a matter of organization." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"Ponder and deliberate before you make a move." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"Success in warfare is gained by carefully accommodating ourselves to the enemy’s purpose." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"The natural formation of the country is the soldier’s best ally." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"The skillful soldier does not raise a second levy, nor are his supply wagons loaded more than once." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"There is no instance of a country having benefitted from prolonged warfare." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"This is called, using the conquered foe to augment one’s own strength." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the highest skill. To subdue the enemy without righting is the highest skill." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"We can form a single united body, while the enemy must split up into fractions. Hence there will be a whole pitted against separate parts of a whole, which means that we shall be many to the enemy’s few." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"We cannot enter into alliances until we are acquainted with the designs of our neighbors." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"We shall be unable to turn natural advantage to account unless we make use of local guides." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"When the general is weak and without authority; when his orders are not clear and distinct; when there are no fixed duties assigned to officers and men, and the ranks are formed in a slovenly haphazard manner, the result is utter disorganization." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

"Whether to concentrate or to divide your troops must be decided by circumstances." (Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", 5th century BC)

Week 2022-05: Gregory Bateson - Collected Quotes

"If a man achieves or suffers change in premises which are deeply embedded in his mind, he will surely find that the results of that change will ramify throughout his whole universe." (Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", 1972)

"In no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are imminent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole." (Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", 1972)

"Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics." (Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", 1972)

"We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum." (Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", 1972)

"What we mean by information - the elementary unit of information - is a difference which makes a difference, and it is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continually transformed are themselves provided with energy. The pathways are ready to be triggered. We may even say that the question is already implicit in them." (Gregory Bateson, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", 1972)

"Information is any difference that makes a difference."(Gregory Bateson, "Mind and Nature: A necessary unity", 1979)

"Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls." (Gregory Bateson, "Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity", 1979)

"The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named." (Gregory Bateson, "Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity", 1979)

"The world partly becomes - comes to be - how it is imagined." (Gregory Bateson, "Mind and Nature: A necessary unity", 1979)

Week 2022-04: Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina] - Collected Quotes

"Absence of understanding does not warrant absence of existence." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina]) 

"Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina])

"Cultivate the self with learning in order to progress and leave all else; for knowledge is an abode of all things. 

The self is like glass, the knowledge, like a lamp, and the wisdom of God, like oil. 

When your self is illuminated - you are alive, and when there is darkness - you are dead." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina])

"Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina])

"Further, this power which conceives these ideas does at times gain from sense forms mental, imaginative, and innate in (instinctive to) itself; and in such a case it does this in that it lays before itself the forms that are in the conceiving power and in the remembering (preserving) power, by employing the imaginative and the conjecturing power, and then contemplates them, and finds them to have participated in some forms and to have differed in some other forms; and finds some amongst the forms that are in these powers to be essential and others to be accidental." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina])

"God is knowledge; he is knowing; and he is being known. Since God has knowledge of his own essence, and since God is one, it follows that the essence of God is knowledge. And knowledge means that he knows himself, and is known by himself." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina], "al-Risalat al-Arshiya")

"It is evident that everything which does not exist at first and then exists, is determined by something other than itself." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina])

"Medicine deals with the states of health and disease in the human body. It is a truism of philosophy that a complete knowledge of a thing can only be obtained by elucidating its causes and antecedents, provided, of course, such causes exist. In medicine it is, therefore, necessary that causes of both health and disease should be determined." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina]) 

"Now it is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina]) 

"Pain is a sensation produced by something contrary to the course of nature and this sensation is set up by one of two circumstances: either a very sudden change of the temperament (or the bad effect of a contrary temperament) or a solution of continuity." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina]) 

"Prayer is that which enables the soul to realize its divinity. Through prayer human beings worship absolute truth, and seek an eternal reward. Prayer is the foundation-stone of religion; and religion is the means by which the soul is purified of all that pollutes it. Prayer is the worship of the first cause of all things, the supreme ruler of all the world, the source of all strength. Prayer is the adoration of the one whose being is necessary." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina], "Kitab al-Najat")

"The different sorts of madness are innumerable." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina]) 

"The mind (Understanding, Reason) is in fact and deed wholly and solely nothing else than the forms of mentally-grasped things, if these be arrayed in the very mind potentially, and through it they are brought out to effective action; and hence it is said that the mind is in fact and deed at once both understanding and understood. Amongst the properties of the understanding power is this, that it unifies the many and multiplies the one through analysis and synthesis. As to multiplication, it is such as the analysis of one man into essence, body, nourishment-getting, animal, speaking (rational). As to unification of the many, it is such as the composition (synthesis) of this one man out of essence, body, animal, speaking (rational) into one notion which is mankind (human being)."(Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina])

 

"The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina]) 

"When knowledge reaches the specific natures and what is accidental to them, inquiry stops and is not followed by the fleeting knowledge of individuals to which our souls are not at all inclined." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina], "The Physics of The Healing", cca. 1014)

Week 2022-03: Paulo Coelho - Collected Quotes

"Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself." (Paulo Coelho, "The Pilgrimage", 1987)

"Everything on earth is being continuously transformed, because the earth is alive. and it has a soul. We are part of that soul, so we rarely recognize that it is working for us." (Paulo Coelho, "The Alchemist", 1988)

"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting." (Paulo Coelho, "The Alchemist", 1988)

"People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don't deserve them, or that they'll be unable to achieve them. We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren't, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands. Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly."(Paulo Coelho, "The Alchemist", 1988)

"When you cease doubting, you have stopped moving forward." (Paulo Coelho, "Brida", 1990)

"Life takes us by surprise and orders us to move toward the unknown - even when we don't want to and when we think we don't need to." (Paulo Coelho, "By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept", 1994)

"The spiritual path can only be traveled through the daily experience of love." (Paulo Coelho, "By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept", 1994)

"At every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss."(Paulo Coelho, "Eleven Minutes", 2003)

"Life always waits for some crisis to occur before revealing itself at its most brilliant." (Paulo Coelho, "Eleven Minutes", 2003)

"Love is not to be found in someone else, but in ourselves; we simply awaken it. But in order to do that, we need the other person." (Paulo Coelho, "Eleven Minutes", 2003)

"Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams." (Paulo Coelho, "The Zahir: A Novel of Obsession", 2005)

"We humans have two great problems: the first is knowing when to begin; the second is knowing when to stop." (Paulo Coelho, "The Zahir: A Novel of Obsession", 2005)

"Everyone's looking for the perfect teacher, but although their teachings might be divine, teachers are all too human, and that's something people find hard to accept. Don't confuse the teacher with the lesson, the ritual with the ecstasy, the transmitter of the symbol with the symbol itself." (Paulo Coelho, "The Witch of Portobello: A Novel", 2006) 

"Everyone contributes a word, a sentence, an image, but in the end it all makes sense: the happiness of one becomes the joy of all."(Paulo Coelho, "Aleph", 2011)

"I understand that everything is connected, that all roads meet, and that all rivers flow into the same sea." (Paulo Coelho, "Aleph", 2011)

"If you want to see a rainbow you have to learn to see the rain." (Paulo Coelho, "Aleph", 2011)

"That is what marks out the warrior: the knowledge that willpower and courage are not the same thing. Courage can attract fear and adulation, but willpower requires patience and commitment. Men and women with immense willpower are generally solitary types and give off a kind of coolness. Many people mistakenly think that (they) are cold (people) when nothing could be further from the truth." (Paulo Coelho, "Aleph", 2011)

"Excessive caution destroys the soul and the heart, because living is an act of courage, and an act of courage is always an act of love." (Paulo Coelho, "Manuscript Found in Accra", 2012)

"Love rules, but no one knows where it has its throne; in order to know that secret place, you must first submit to Love." (Paulo Coelho, "Manuscript Found in Accra", 2012)

"Love transforms, Love heals. But sometimes it lays deadly traps and ends up destroying the person who decided to surrender himself completely." (Paulo Coelho, "Manuscript Found in Accra", 2012)

"The act of discovering who we are will force us to accept that we can go further than we think." (Paulo Coelho, "Manuscript Found in Accra", 2012)

"All battles in life serve to teach us something, even the battles we lose." (Paulo Coelho)

"Love is looking at the same mountains from different angles." (Paulo Coelho)

"The two hardest tests on the spiritual road are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter." (Paulo Coelho)

Week 2022-02: Hermann Hesse - Collected Quotes

"During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present, and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman." (Hermann Hesse, "Siddhartha", 1910)

"Passion is always a mystery and unaccountable, and unfortunately there is no doubt that life does not spare its purest children and often it is just the most deserving people who cannot help loving those that destroy them." ("Hermann Hesse, "Gertrude", 1910)

"Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again." (Hermann Hesse, "Demian", 1919)

"Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it." (Hermann Hesse, "Siddhartha", 1922)

"Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it." (Hermann Hesse, "Siddhartha", 1922)

"All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast." (Hermann Hesse, "Narcissus and Goldmund", 1930)

"All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies, and lies." (Hermann Hesse)

"Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into a new order." (Hermann Hesse)

"It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is." (Hermann Hesse)

"Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin." (Hermann Hesse)

"Seeking means to have a goal; but finding means to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose." (Hermann Hesse)

"Some of us think holding on makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go." (Herman Hesse)

"There is no reality except the one contained within us." (Herman Hesse)

"Whither will my path yet lead me? This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it." (Hermann Hesse)

"Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time." (Hermann Hesse)

Week 2021-52: Osho [Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh] - Collected Quotes

"A single word from you will show the mind inside; a single word and your whole being is exposed. Not even a word is needed; just a gesture and your chattering mind will be there. Even if you are silent, your silence will not reveal anything other than the chattering monkey within." (Osho, "Hsin Hsin Ming: The Book of Nothing", [talks] 1974)

"The mind cannot be healthy because it can never be whole. Mind is always divided; division is its base." (Osho, "Hsin Hsin Ming: The Book of Nothing", [talks] 1974)

"Tantra says there is nobody above you whom you have to follow, through whom you have to get your pattern." (Osho [Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh], "Tantra: the Supreme Understanding", 1975)

"Mindfulness is Buddha's word for meditation. By mindfulness he means: you should always remain alert, watchful. You should always remain present. Not a single thing should be done in a sort of sleepy state of mind. You should not move like a somnambulist, you should move with a sharp consciousness." (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, "The Discipline of Transcendence: Discourses on the Forty-two Sutras of Buddha", 1978)

"One has to reach to the absolute state of awareness: that is Zen. You cannot do it every morning for a few minutes or for half an hour and then forget all about it. It has to become like your heartbeat. You have to sit in it, you have to walk in it. Yes, you have even to sleep in it." (Osho [Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh], "Walking in Zen, Sitting in Zen", 1982)

"All the Buddhas of all the ages have been telling you a very simple fact: Be - don't try to become. Within these two words - being and becoming, your whole life is contained. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance." (Osho [Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh], "The Book of Wisdom", 1983)

"Remain in wonder if you want mysteries to open up for you. Mysteries never open up for those who go on questioning. Questioners sooner or later end up in a library. They end up with scriptures, because scriptures are full of answers. And answers are dangerous, they kill your wonder." (Osho [Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh], "The Book of Wisdom", 1983)

"Enlightenment is always through surrender, but surrender is achieved through intelligence. Only idiots cannot surrender. To surrender you need great intelligence. To see the point of surrender is the climax of insight; to see the point that you are not separate from existence is the highest that intelligence can give to you." (Osho [Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh], "From I to Q", 1984)

"Thinking goes on in your head. It is not really deep into the roots of your being; it is not your totality." (Osho [Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh], "From R to Z", 1984)

"When you really laugh, for those few moments you are in a deep meditative state. Thinking stops. It is impossible to laugh and think together... If you are still thinking. laughter will be just so-so... It will be a crippled laughter." (Osho [Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh], "From I to Q", 1984)

"Meditation is the awareness that I am not the mind." (Osho)

"Meditation is nothing but an effort to look at reality without the thinking mind - because that is the only way to see reality. If thinking is there it distorts, it corrupts. Drop the thinking mind and see reality - direct, immediate, face to face. And then there is no problem." (Osho)

"Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That's its balance." (Osho)

"Suffering is a challenge; when you suffer you are challenged, when there is a problem you are challenged. When you encounter the problem, only then do you grow. More insecurity, more growth; more security, less growth. If everything is secure around you, you are already in your grave, you are no longer alive. Life exists in danger, life always exists in the possibility of going astray. But one who goes astray can come back, one who fails can succeed." (Osho)

"When mind knows, we call it knowledge. When heart knows, we call it love. And when being knows, we call it meditation." (Osho)

Week 2021-51: Anthony de Mello - Collected Quotes

"A good teacher offers practice, a bad one offers theories." (Anthony de Mello, "One Minute Wisdom", 1988)

"All suffering comes from a person's inability to sit still and be alone." (Anthony de Mello, "One Minute Wisdom", 1988)

"People who deliberate fully before they take a step will spend their lives on one leg." (Anthony de Mello, "One Minute Wisdom", 1988)

"Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it." (Anthony de Mello, "One Minute Wisdom", 1988)

"Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance." (Anthony de Mello, "One Minute Wisdom", 1988)

"Spirituality practiced in the state of activity is incomparably superior to that practiced in a state of withdrawal." (Anthony de Mello, "One Minute Wisdom", 1988)

"You can read books without ever stepping into a library; and practice spirituality without ever going to a temple." (Anthony de Mello, " One Minute Wisdom", 1988)

"Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself, you will see through everyone. Then you will love them. Otherwise you spend the whole time grappling with your wrong notions of them, with your illusions that are constantly crashing against reality." (Anthony de Mello, "Awareness: Conversations with the Masters", 1990)

"Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture." (Anthony de Mello, "Awareness: Conversations with the Masters", 1990)

"Nobody is afraid of the unknown, what you really fear is the loss of the known." (Anthony de Mello, "Awareness: Conversations with the Masters", 1990)

"Ordinarily, everything we do is in our self-interest. Everything." (Anthony de Mello, "Awareness: Conversations with the Masters", 1990)

"Pleasant experiences make life delightful. Painful experiences lead to growth." (Anthony de Mello, "Awareness: Conversations with the Masters", 1990)

"The three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are, first, returning love for hate; second, including the excluded; third, admitting that you are wrong." (Anthony de Mello, "Awareness: Conversations with the Masters", 1990)

"There's only one reason why you're not experiencing bliss at this present moment, and it's because you're thinking or focusing on what you don't have. [...] But, right now you have everything you need to be in bliss." (Anthony de Mello, "Awareness: Conversations with the Masters", 1990)

"Understand the obstructions you are putting in the way of love, freedom, and happiness and they will drop. Turn on the light of awareness and the darkness will disappear. Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something you have; love is something that has you." (Anthony de Mello, "Awareness: Conversations with the Masters", 1990)

"What is a loving heart? A loving heart is sensitive to the whole of life, to all persons; a loving heart doesn't harden itself to any persons or things." (Anthony de Mello, "Awareness: Conversations with the Masters", 1990)

"You are never in love with anyone. You're only in love with your prejudiced and hopeful idea of that person." (Anthony de Mello, "Awareness: Conversations with the Masters", 1990)

"Mostly the discontent that you feel comes from not having enough of something - you are dissatisfied because you think you do not have enough money or power or success or fame or virtue or love or holiness. This is not the discontent that leads to the joy of the kingdom. Its source is greed and ambition and its fruit is restlessness and frustration. The day you are discontented not because you want more of something but without knowing what it is you want; when you are sick at heart of everything you are pursuing so far and you are sick of the pursuing itself, then your heart will attain a great clarity, an insight that will cause you mysteriously to delight in everything and in nothing." (Anthony de Mello, "The Way to Love", 1995)

"The tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness. But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness – it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness, and it is always accompanied, of course, by the anxiety that you may lose the object of your attachment." (Anthony de Mello, "The Way to Love", 1995)

"Understand your darkness and it will vanish; then you will know what light is. Understand your nightmare for what it is and it will stop; then you will wake up to reality. Understand your false beliefs and they will drop; then you will know the taste of happiness." (Anthony de Mello, "The Way to Love", 1995)

"To relate is to react. To react is to understand oneself. To understand oneself is to be enlightened. Relationships are schools for enlightenment." (Anthony de Mello, "Heart of the Enlightened: A Book of Story Meditations", 1997)

"A nice definition of an awakened person: a person who no longer marches to the drums of society, a person who dances to the tune of the music that springs up from within." (Anthony de Mello, "Anthony De Mello: Writings", 1999) 

"Most people don't live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts - generally somebody else's - mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions." (Anthony de Mello, "Anthony De Mello: Writings", 1999) 

"The only way someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas. If you're ready to listen and if you're ready to be challenged, there's one thing that you can do, but no one can help you. What is this most important thing of all? It's called self-observation." (Anthony de Mello, "Anthony De Mello: Writings", 1999) 

"This is what is ultimate in our human knowledge of God, to know that we do not know." (Anthony de Mello, "Anthony De Mello: Writings", 1999)

"No one is exempt from talking nonsense. The great misfortune is to do it solemnly." (Anthony de Mello, "One Minute Nonsense", 2003)

"To those who seek to protect their ego true Peace brings only disturbance." (Anthony de Mello, "One Minute Nonsense", 2003)

"Sin is a refusal to grow, a refusal to love, a refusal to get committed, to be concerned, and to take risks." (Anthony de Mello, "Seek God Everywhere: Reflections on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius", 2010)

Week 2021-50: Jack Kornfield - Collected Quotes

"Anger shows us precisely where we are stuck, where our limits are, where we cling to beliefs and fears." (Jack Kornfield & Joseph Goldstein, "Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation", 1987)

"Compassion for ourselves gives rise to the power to transform resentment into forgiveness, hatred into friendliness, and fear into respect for all beings." (Jack Kornfield & Joseph Goldstein, "Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation", 1987)

"The first level of practice is illuminated by the qualities of courage and renunciation." (Jack Kornfield & Joseph Goldstein, "Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation", 1987)

"Meditation is a vehicle for opening to the truth of this impermanence on deeper and deeper levels." (Jack Kornfield & Joseph Goldstein, "Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation", 1987)

"No amount of meditation, yoga, diet, and reflection will make all of our problems go away, but we can transform our difficulties into our practice until little by little they guide us on our way." (Jack Kornfield & Joseph Goldstein, "Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation", 1987)

"The near enemy of love is attachment. Attachment masquerades as love. It says, I will love this person because I need them. Or, I'll love you if you'll love me back. I'll love you, but only if you will be the way I want. This isn't love at all - it is attachment - and attachment is rigid, it is very different from love." (Jack Kornfield & Joseph Goldstein, "Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation", 1987)

"The path of awakening begins with a step the Buddha called right understanding." (Jack Kornfield & Joseph Goldstein, "Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation", 1987)

"The willingness to empty ourselves and then seek our true nature is an expression of great and courageous love." (Jack Kornfield & Joseph Goldstein, "Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation", 1987)

"To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one."  (Jack Kornfield & Joseph Goldstein, "Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation", 1987)

"To understand ourselves and our life is the point of insight meditation: to understand and to be free." (Jack Kornfield & Joseph Goldstein, "Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation", 1987)

"Two qualities are at the root of all meditation development: right effort and right aim—arousing effort to aim the mind toward the object." (Jack Kornfield, "Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation", 1987)

"We need a warrior's heart that lets us face our lives directly, our pains and limitations, our joys and possibilities." (Jack Kornfield, "Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation", 1987)

"Breathing meditation can quiet the mind, open the body, and develop a great power of concentration." (Jack Kornfield, "A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life", 1993)

"Compassion for ourselves gives rise to the power to transform resentment into forgiveness, hatred into friendliness, and fear into respect for all beings." (Jack Kornfield, "A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life", 1993)

"Even the most exalted states and the most exceptional spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given with our hearts." (Jack Kornfield, "A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life", 1993)

"For most of us, generosity is a quality that must be developed. We have to respect that it will grow gradually; otherwise our spirituality can become idealistic and imitative, acting out the image of generosity before it has become genuine." (Jack Kornfield, "A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life", 1993)

"It is possible to speak with our heart directly. Most ancient cultures know this. We can actually converse with our heart as if it were a good friend. In modern life we have become so busy with our daily affairs and thoughts that we have lost this essential art of taking time to converse with our heart." (Jack Kornfield, "A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life", 1993)

"Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past. To come into the present is to stop the war." (Jack Kornfield, "A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life", 1993)

"Only in the reality of the present can we love, can we awaken, can we find peace and understanding and connection with ourselves and the world." (Jack Kornfield, "A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life", 1993)

"Religion and philosophy have their value, but in the end all we can do is open to mystery and live a path with heart." (Jack Kornfield, "A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life", 1993)

"The basic principle of spiritual life is that our problems become the very place to discover wisdom and love." (Jack Kornfield, "A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life", 1993)

"To learn to concentrate we must choose a prayer or meditation and follow this path with commitment and steadiness, a willingness to work with our practice day after day, no matter what arises." (Jack Kornfield, "A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life", 1993)

"To live life is to make a succession of errors. Understanding this can bring us great ease and forgiveness for ourselves and others." (Jack Kornfield, "A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life", 1993)

"We are awakened to the profound realization that the true path to liberation is to let go of everything." (Jack Kornfield, "A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life", 1993)

"We must look at ourselves over and over again in order to learn to love, to discover what has kept our hearts closed, and what it means to allow our hearts to open." (Jack Kornfield, "A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life", 1993)

"When we struggle to change ourselves we, in fact, only continue the patterns of self-judgement and aggression. We keep the war against ourselves alive." (Jack Kornfield, "A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life", 1993)

"There are many good forms of meditation practice. A good meditation practice is any one that develops awareness or mindfulness of our body and our sense, of our mind and heart." (Jack Kornfield, "Meditation for Beginners", 1998)

"To meditate is to discover new possibilities, to awaken the capacities of us has to live more wisely, more lovingly, more compassionately, and more fully." (Jack Kornfield, "Meditation for Beginners", 1998)

"When we take time to quiet ourselves, we can all sense that our life could be lived with greater compassion and greater weakness." (Jack Kornfield, "Meditation for Beginners", 1998)

"An honorable spiritual practice recognizes the losses we have suffered, tells our story, and sheds our tears to free us from the past." (Jack Kornfield, "After the Ecstasy, The Laundry", 2000)

"In all practices and traditions of freedom, we find the heart's task to be quite simple. Life offers us just what it offers, and our task is to bow to it, to meet it with understanding and compassion." (Jack Kornfield, "After the Ecstasy, The Laundry", 2000)

"When our identity expands to include everything, we find a peace with the dance of the world. The ocean of life rises and falls within us - birth and death, joy and pain, it is all ours, and our heart is full and empty, large enough to embrace it all." (Jack Kornfield, "After the Ecstasy, The Laundry", 2000)

"Do not doubt your own basic goodness. In spite of all confusion and fear, you are born with a heart that knows what is just, loving, and beautiful." (Jack Kornfield, "The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace", 2002)

"Indifference pretends to create peace, but it is based on not caring, a silent resignation. It is a movement away, a separation fed by a subtle fear of the heart. We pull back, believing that what happens to others is not our concern. Our courage leaves us. Indifference is a misguided way of defending ourselves." (Jack Kornfield, "The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace", 2002)

"Letting go is not the same as aversion, struggling to get rid of something. We cannot genuinely let go of what we resist. What we resist and fear secretly follows us even as we push it away. To let go of fear or trauma, we need to acknowledge just how it is. We need to feel it fully and accept that it is so. It is as it is. Letting go begins with letting be." (Jack Kornfield, "The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace", 2002)

"Love creates a communion with life. Love expands us, connects us, sweetens us, ennobles us. Love springs up in tender concern, it blossoms into caring action. It makes beauty out of all we touch. In any moment we can step beyond our small self and embrace each other as beloved parts of a whole." (Jack Kornfield, "The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace", 2002)

"Love is based on our capacity to trust in a reality beyond fear, to trust a timeless truth bigger than all our difficulties." (Jack Kornfield, "The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace", 2002)

"The knowledge of the past stays with us. To let go is to release the images and emotions, the grudges and fears, the clingings and disappointments of the past that bind our spirit." (Jack Kornfield, "The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace", 2002)

"Most people discover that when hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their own pain." (Jack Kornfield, "The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology", 2008)

"What is truly a part of our spiritual path is that which brings us alive. If gardening brings us alive, that is part of our path, if it is music, if it is conversation [...] we must follow what brings us alive." (Jack Kornfield, "The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology", 2008)

"Forgiveness does not mean that we have to continue to relate to those who have done us harm. In some cases the best practice may be to end our connection, to never speak to or be with a harmful person again. Sometimes in the process of forgiveness a person who hurts or betrayed us may wish to make amends, but even this does not require us to put ourselves in the way of further harm." (Jack Kornfield, "Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are", 2011)