Famous Quotes & Sayings

Lamar Alexander

It is ironic that Mr. Berger learned of this espionage in exactly the same month that Mr. Gore was attending his now famous fund-raiser with Buddhist nuns in Southern California.

Morris West

Well I travelled quite a lot in the east, and one of the things that impressed me greatly was the buddhist notion of the continuity of things, the wheel of life which is what we're talking about, the ever turning wheel.

Max Muller

To me this technical acceptation seems not applicable here, where we have to deal with the simplest moral precepts, and not with psychological niceties of Buddhist philosophy.

Max Muller

Would you say that any one sacred book is superior to all others in the world? ... I say the New Testament, after that, I should place the Koran , which in its moral teachings, is hardly more than a later edition of the New Testament. Then would follow according to my opinion the Old Testament, the Southern Buddhist Tripitaka , the Tao-te-king of Laotze , the Kings of Confucius , the Veda and the Avesta .

Sam Harris

One could surely argue that the Buddhist tradition, taken as a whole, represents the richest source of contemplative wisdom that any civilization has produced.

Russell Simmons

The word mantra comes from two Sanskrit words man, ("to think") and tra ("tool'). So the literal translation is "a tool of thought." And that's how mantras are used in Buddhist and Hindu practices, as tools that clear your mind of distractions. Because when you focus on repeating that mantra over and over again, soon the noise will die down and all you will hear is your inner voice.

Ron Reagan

I admire the fact that the central core of Buddhist teaching involves mindfulness and loving kindness and compassion.

Roger Zelazny

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

Philip Greenspun

Although the Buddhists will tell you that desire is the root of suffering, my personal experience leads me to point the finger at system administration.

Pema Chodron

Buddhist words such as compassion and emptiness don't mean much until we start cultivating our innate ability simply to be there with pain with an open heart and the willingness not to instantly try to get ground under our feet. For instance, if what we're feeling is rage, we usually assume that there are only two ways to relate to it. One is to blame others. Lay it all on somebody else; drive all blames into everyone else. The other alternative is to feel guilty about our rage and blame ourselves.

Pema Chodron

According to the Buddhist belief, you can go on and on indefinitely, so you see your life as just a brief moment in time.

Pema Chodron

What's encouraging about meditation is that, even if we shut down, we can no longer shut down in ignorance. We see very clearly that we're closing off. That in itself begins to illuminate the darkness of ignorance.

Pema Chodron

The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God. . . Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there's some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us. . . Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.

Pema Chodron

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

Pema Chodron

The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.

Pema Chodron

If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart...

Pema Chodron

As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.

Pearl Cleage

You know the Buddhists believe that sometimes when everything is in turmoil, it's because something wonderful is ready to be born and that thing is distracting you so it can have some privacy during the birthing process.

Terence McKenna

One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.

Shunryu Suzuki

If enlightenment comes first, before thinking, before practice, your thinking and your practice will not be self-centered. By enlightenment I mean believing in nothing, believing in something which has no form or no color, which is ready to take form or color. This enlightenment is the immutable truth. It is on this orginal truth that our activity, our thinking, and our practice should be based.

Shunryu Suzuki

Happiness is sorrow; sorrow is happiness. There is happiness in difficulty; difficulty in happiness. Even though the ways we feel are different, they are not really different; in essense they are the same. This is the true understanding transmitted from Buddha to us.

Shunryu Suzuki

Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.

Larry Dossey

Alan Watts, the Buddhist scholar, proposed the existence of a mental faculty he called forgettory, which is the flip side of memory. There are times, Watts maintained, when we need to forget things, to let them slip away into the unremembered past.

Taryn Manning

I meditate twice a day. I chant. I lean more towards Buddhist practices.

Sharon Salzberg

In our usual mind state, we are continually activating the process that in Buddhist terminology is known as 'bhava,' which literally means 'becoming.' In this space of becoming, we are subtly leaning forward into the future, trying to have security based on feeling that we can hold on, we can try to keep things from changing.

Sharon Salzberg

From the Buddhist point of view, it is true that emptiness is a characteristic of all of life - if we look carefully at any experience we will find transparency, insubstantiality, with no solid, unchanging core to our experience. But that does not mean that nothing matters.

Sharon Salzberg

In Buddhist teaching, ignorance is considered the fundamental cause of violence - ignorance... about the separation of self and other... about the consequences of our actions.

Sharon Salzberg

There's a famous quotation from the time the Buddha learned of the deaths of two of his greatest disciples: "It's as if the sun and the moon have left the sky." From that quotation, I would guess that while the Buddha loved all beings everywhere, with no exclusion, he also had relationships that were special to him, and he felt their loss.

Sharon Salzberg

We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it.

Sharon Salzberg

If you’re reading these words, perhaps it’s because something has kicked open the door for you, and you’re ready to embrace change. It isn’t enough to appreciate change from afar, or only in the abstract, or as something that can happen to other people but not to you. We need to create change for ourselves, in a workable way, as part of our everyday lives.

Tao Lin

note the similarities with buddhism a buddhist who has achieved nirvana is not sad primarily because it does not know the concept of sad [...]

Tara Brach

I think the reason Buddhism and Western psychology are so compatible is that Western psychology helps to identify the stories and the patterns in our personal lives, but what Buddhist awareness training does is it actually allows the person to develop skills to stay in what's going on.