Selected mindfulness quotes

1. I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

2. Don't let your hearts grow numb. Stay alert. It is your soul which matters.

3. As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.

4. Sit still. Stop thinking. Shut up. Get out! The first two of these instructions comprise the whole of the technique of Yoga. The last two are of a sublimity which it would be improper to expound in this present elementary stage.

5. I just want to live each moment, but it's kind of hard to do that when you are asked to analyze yourself constantly. But it's also good in that you are forced to think about things that you don't ordinarily think about. I think it's strange.

6. Any time you are with anyone or think of anyone you must say to yourself: I am dying and this person too is dying, attempting the while to experience the truth of the words you are saying. If every one of you agrees to practice this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise.

7. Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it.

8. 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.

9. Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.

10. I try to take life as it comes, and just hope it keeps coming.

11. Instead of past, present and future, I'd prefer chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry.

12. Give up thinking as though not giving it up. Observe techniques as though not observing.

13. Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes.

14. Most of us don't know about happiness until it's over.

15. The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.

16. The earth is my altar, the sky is my dome, mind is my garden, the heart is my home and I'm always at home - yea, I'm always at Om.

17. Heaven is home. Utopia is here. Nirvana is now.

18. What do I want to take home from my summer vacation? Time. The wonderful luxury of being at rest. The days when you shut down the mental machinery that keeps life on track and let life simply wander. The days when you stop planning, analyzing, thinking and just are. Summer is my period of grace.

19. Of pleasures, those which occur most rarely give the most delight.

20. Think of God more often than thou breathest.

21. A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.

22. Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.

23. Rather than continuing to seek the truth, simply let go of your views.

24. Worry is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble.

25. I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again.

26. Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical guise.

27. Be careful what you swallow. Chew!

28. He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.

29. You must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.

30. There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

31. If you aren't in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret.

32. If it's dangerous to talk to yourself, it's probably even dicier to listen.

33. We should live our lives as though Christ were coming this afternoon.

34. Wherever life takes us, there are always moments of wonder.

35. Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.

36. The gay motes that people the sunbeams.

37. Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common every-day beauty.

38. Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.

39. You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

40. To me there is in happiness an element of self-forgetfulness. You lose yourself in something outside yourself when you are happy; just as when you are desperately miserable you are intensely conscious of yourself, are a solid little lump of ego weighing a ton.

41. -tommorow is our permanent address and there they'll scarcely find us(if they do, we'll move away still further:into now

42. dreamtree,truthtree tree of jubilee:with aeons of (trivial merely)existence,all when may not measure a now of your treasure

43. I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks

44. I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

45. You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

46. Permitte divis cetera.

47. The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.

48. If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.

49. I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'

50. This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

51. Just as rust, which arose from the iron itself, wears out the iron, likewise, performing an action without examination would destroy us by projecting us into a negative state of existence.

52. O Lord! thou knowest how busy I must be this day: if I forget thee, do not thou forget me.

53. When you fly a balloon you don't file a flight plan; you go where the wind goes. You feel like part of the air. You almost feel like part of eternity, and you just float along.

54. Why thus longing, thus forever sighing For the far-off, unattained, and dim, While the beautiful all round thee lying Offers up its low, perpetual hymn?

55. Wer immer in Zerstreuungen lebt, wird fremd im eigenen Herzen.

56. At dawn, a railwaywoman On a country platform whirls on the end of a chain An irrelevant key, while a young guard makes to wipe A crumb from her lapel; and see, she smiles A permissory smile you take in from your corner seat: A cameo of unrehearsed perfection.

57. 'Stop the voices! Stop them!'

58. Welcome anything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.

59. I am in the present and only the present matters to me.

60. Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots!

61. We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

62. But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day, and the race a life.

63. The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far as we are concerned, if it does not make us realize that at every moment of every year in our lives Donne's question 'What if this present were the world's last night?' is equally relevant.

64. A warrior-hunter knows that his death is waiting, and the very act he is performing now may well be his last battle on earth. He calls it a battle because it is a struggle. Most people move from act to act without any struggle or thought. A warrior-hunter, on the contrary, assesses every act; and since he has intimate knowledge of his death, he proceeds judiciously, as if every act were his last battle. Only a fool would fail to notice the advantage a warrior-hunter has over his fellow men. A warrior-hunter gives his last battle its due respect. It's only natural that his last act on earth should be the best of himself. It's pleasurable that way. It dulls the edge of his fright.

65. 'Don't burn the day away'

66. 'Look, here are we on this starry night staring into space, and I must say I feel as small as dust lying down here'

67. You wilfully ignore the small, gentle observations in life which you know are the most important.

68. We are always in our own company.

69. We want to be poets of our life - first of all in the smallest most everyday matters.

70. The greatest events are not our loudest hours, but rather our most quiet.

71. When you've seen beyond yourself, then you may find, peace of mind is waiting there.

72. Try to realize it's all within yourself no one else can make you change, and to see you're only very small and life flows on within you and without you.

73. No man can order his life, for it comes flowing over him from behind ... The one secret of life and development is not to devise and plan but to fall in with the forces at work - to do every moment's duty aright - that being the part in the process allotted to us: and let come - not what will, for there is no such thing - but what the eternal thought wills for each of us, has intended in each of us from the first.

74. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, and I'm going to be happy in it.

75. I'm not good at future planning. I don't plan at all. I don't know what I'm doing tomorrow. I don't have a day planner and I don't have a diary. I completely live in the now, not in the past, not in the future.

76. Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough, What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town, If juster battles are enacted now Between the ants upon this hummock's crown?

77. You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.

78. Have no mean hours, but be grateful for every hour, and accept what it brings. The reality will make any sincere record respectable. No day will have been wholly misspent, if one sincere, thoughtful page has been written. Let the daily tide leave some deposit on these pages, as it leaves sand and shells on the shore. So much increase of terra firma. this may be a calendar of the ebbs and flows of the soul; and on these sheets as a beach, the waves may cast up pearls and seaweed.

79. It is a great art to saunter.

80. A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.

81. The wisest man preaches no doctrines; he has no scheme; he sees no rafter, not even a cobweb, against the heavens. It is clear sky. If I ever see more clearly at one time than at another, the medium through which I see is clearer.

82. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

83. I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day.

84. Those things which now most engage the attention of men, as politics and the daily routine, are, it is true, vital functions of human society, but should be unconsciously performed, like the corresponding functions of the physical body. They are infra-human, a kind of vegetation. I sometimes awake to a half-consciousness of them going on about me, as a man may become conscious of some of the processes of digestion in a morbid state, and so have the dyspepsia, as it is called.

85. She with one breath attunes the spheres, And also my poor human heart.

86. Thoreau believed that one of the arts of life was to make the most of it. He loved the multum in parvo, or pot-luck; to boil up the little into the big. Thus, he was in the habit of saying, - Give me healthy senses, let me be thoroughly alive, and breathe freely in the very flood-tide of the living world. But this should have availed him little, if he had not been at the same time copiously endowed with the power of recording what he imbibed. His senses truly lived twice.

87. Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered for they are gone forever.

88. I swear to you, you're missing the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim only. To endow the person who says it with Christ-Consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who'll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make all your nasty Weltschmerzen and Professor Tuppers go away and never come back. And by God, if you have intelligence enough to see that - and you do - and yet you refuse to see it, then you're misusing the prayer, you're using it to ask for a world full of dolls and saints and no Professor Tuppers.

89. 'Could you try not aiming so much?' he asked me, still standing there. 'If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck.' He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. 'How can it be luck if I aim?' I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. 'Because it will be,' he said. 'You'll be glad if you hit his marble - Ira's marble - won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it.'

90. I tell my wife, You got plenty of time left. Don't live so fast. Slow down and live, and don't try to catch up.

91. I had a very pleasant evening, however, though you will probably find out that there was no particular reason for it; but I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it.

92. 'Wherever you are, be all there. Live to the hilt every situation that you believe to be the will of God.'

93. Willst du immer weiterschweifen? Sieh, das Gute liegt so nah. Lerne nur das Gluck ergreifen, denn das Gluck ist immer da.

94. O'er all the hilltops Is quiet now, In all the treetops Hearest thou Hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the trees: Wait; soon like these Thou too shalt rest.

95. Jimmy Porter: They spend their time mostly looking forward to the past.

96. I am always in haste, but never in a hurry.

97. We overcomplicate things, if you get down to the real base needs of a human being. We don't wake up every morning and go, 'Thank God, another day.' Yet every time we take in a breath, it's a gift.' (2004)

98. A religion of fulfilment must provide bustling secular man with contacts with all that is permanent and enduring, with the deeper and higher aspects of existence; indeed, with every possible opportunity of transcending the limitations not only of his day-by-day existence in the equivalents of shared worship, but of his little secular self in acts of meditation and self-examination and in retreats from the secular world of affairs.

99. Wherever you are is the entry point.

100. All busy in the sunlight The flecks did float and dance, And I was tumbled up with them In formless circumstance.