Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature will not be Buddhist: she resents generalizing, and insults the philosopher in every moment with a million fresh particulars.

Laurie Anderson

I didn't really understand that Vipassana is a relatively new form of Buddhism that was based on the storage of pain. So the idea is that every time you don't scream, that's your Buddhist side.

Laurie Anderson

I'm thrilled by the fact that I made something out of nothing. There it is! It wasn't there before: there it is - I made it! That's pretty powerful, and that's the power that Buddhists give to every single person.

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.

Tara Brach

Buddhist practices offer a way of saying, 'Hey, come back over here, reconnect.' The only way that you'll actually wake up and have some freedom is if you have the capacity and courage to stay with the vulnerability and the discomfort.

Tara Brach

Pain is not wrong. Reacting to pain as wrong initiates the trance of unworthiness. The moment we believe something is wrong, our world shrinks and we lose ourselves in the effort to combat the pain.

Swami Vivekananda

The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also.

K. D. Lang

I sort of believe that my voice was preordained; I'm a Buddhist who believes in reincarnation so I think that my voice is a few lifetimes old.

Patrick Duffy

I get up at sunrise. I'm a Buddhist, so I chant in the morning. My wife and I sit and have coffee together, but then it's list-making time. I have carpentry projects. We have roads we keep in repair. It's not back-breaking, but it's certainly aerobic and mildly strenuous.

Pankaj Mishra

The Buddha would not have liked people to call themselves Buddhist. To him that would have been a fundamental error because there are no fixed identities. He would have thought that someone calling himself a Buddhist has too much invested in calling himself a Buddhist.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

[I'm concerned with] aesthetics and this idea of how the passage between life and death goes. I can visually present that by borrowing this Buddhist statue.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

The Buddhist concept is that it takes 48 days to get near this state [of death]. So it's a slow process, moving into, not a permanent death, but the world of the dead.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

I came to California in 1970 and so many people were asking if I was a Buddhist or knew Zen theory, asking if I was enlightened already or not. So I said, "Yes, I am enlightened," and then I studied quickly to catch up.

John Dryden

Anger will never disappear so long as thoughts of resentment are cherished in the mind. Anger will disappear just as soon as thoughts of resentment are forgotten.

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.

Kent Nerburn

The Buddhists have a story about blind men trying to describe an elephant by feeling it's various parts, and each describes the elephant according to the part he touched. That is the way we can hope to know God.

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.