"When you argue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time."
---
Byron Katie.
"The way out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives."
---
Tara Brach.
"To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work."
---
Mary Oliver.
"Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it."
---
Haruki Murakami.
"Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind."
---
Henry James.
"It is the truth that liberates, not your effort to be free."
---
Jiddu Krishnamurti.
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."
---
Viktor Frankl.
"It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age."
---
Margaret Mead.
"We are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudites of former existences."
---
Loren Eiseley.
"Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you."
---
Anne Lamott.
"The quieter you become, the more you can hear."
---
Ram Dass.
"Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves."
---
Adrienne Rich.
"The effort to try and feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us feel miserable."
---
Oliver Burkeman.
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."
---
Plutarch.
"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."
---
Henry David Thoreau.
"The world is the great gymnasium where we come to make ourselves strong."
---
Swami Vivekananda.
"Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk."
---
Jean-Paul Sartre.
"What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap im the harvest of action."
---
Meister Eckhart.
"What is here now when there's no problem to solve?"
---
Loch Kelly.
"Our capacity to make peace with another person and with the world depends very much on our capacity to make peace with ourselves."
---
Thich Nhat Hanh.
"Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost."
---
Kahil Gibran.
"The most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your own two feet."
---
Shunryu Suzuki.
"The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom."
---
Tara Brach.
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everyting else in the Universe."
---
John Muir.
"Life is like a play: it's not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters."
---
Seneca.
"Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise."
---
Ram Dass.
"My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean.
Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?"
---
David Mitchell.
"In the end, just three things matter:
How well we have lived.
How well we have loved.
How well we have learned to let go."
---
Jack Kornfield.
"One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels."
---
Gustave Flaubert.
"Death is a mirror in which the entire meaning of life is reflected."
---
Sogyal Rinpoche.
"As long as you live, keep learning how to live."
---
Seneca.
"In an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still."
---
Pico Iyer.
"Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
---
Rainer Maria Rilke.
"Paths are made by walking."
---
Franz Kafka.
"Dwell on the beauty of life.
Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them."
---
Marcus Aurelius.
"If you don't like something change it.
If you can't change it, change your attitude."
---
Maya Angelou.
"To live, we must die every instant.
We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible."
---
Thich Nhat Hanh.
"Happiness can exist only in acceptance."
---
George Orwell.
"Do everything with a mind that lets go. Do not expect praise or reward."
---
Ajahn Chah.
"At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough.
You don't need to photograph, pain or even remember it.
It is enough."
---
Toni Morrison.
"I am not one and simple, but complex and many."
---
Virginia Woolf.
"Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people."
---
Carl Jung.
"If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.
If you want to be happy, practice compassion."
---
Dalai Lama.
"I believe in kindness.
Also in mischief.
Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed."
---
Mary Oliver.
"Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily."
---
Fernando Pessoa.
"In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight."
---
Ram Dass.
"True security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity- in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can."
---
Oliver Burkeman.
"The universe is wider than our views of it."
---
Henry David Thoreau.
"Never be so focused on what you're looking for that you overlook the thing that you actually find."
---
Ann Patchett.
"The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment."
---
Pema Chodron.
"You never truly need what you want.
That is the main and thoroughing key to serenity."
---
Albert Ellis.
"What you seek is seeking you."
---
Rumi.
"I have been filled with hopes, fears, despairs, longings, happiness.
Expansive moments, contracting moments.
All of these fluctuations have at one stage been called 'me.'"
---
James Low.
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
---
Bertrand Russell.
"Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant."
---
Joan Didion.
"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."
---
Kurt Vonnegut.
"The miracle is not to walk on water.
The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now."
---
Thich Nhat Hanh.
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
---
Marcel Proust.
"Don't get bored with peace.
Be in it.
Go deeper into it.
Look between the thoughts."
---
Nisargadatta Maharaj.
"Awe is the moment when ego surrenders to wonder."
---
Terry Tempest Williams.
"I look at what I have not and think myself unhappy; others look at what I have and think me happy."
---
Joseph Roux.
"The surest sign of wisdom is continual cheerfulness."
---
Michel de Montaigne.
"What would this moment be like if there were truly nothing missing and nothing to do, nothing to improve, nothing to wait for?"
---
Sam Harris.
"Love is the quality of attention we pay to things."
---
J.D. McClatchy.
"And what importance do I have in the courtroom of oblivion?"
---
Pablo Neruda.
"I am not a thing in the world; I am the space in which the world is happening."
---
Richard Lang.
"The quality of your mind determines the quality of your life."
---
Sam Harris.
"Survival is the ability to swim in strange water."
---
Frank Herbert.
"To sit quietly, without trying to make something special happen, is the most important thing we can do for the transformation of our consciousness."
---
Alan Watts.
"You have to do nothing to be who you are. Nothing at all."
---
H. W. L. Poonja.
"Death makes a mockery of almost everything else we spend our lives doing."
---
Sam Harris.
"The maxim 'Nothing avails but perfection' may be spelt shorter: 'Paralysis'."
---
Winston Churchill.
"Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself."
---
Thomas Browne.
"Many paths lead from the foot of the mountain, but at the peak we all gaze at the single bright moon."
---
Ikkyu.
"You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself."
---
Alan Watts.
"The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much."
---
William Hazlitt.
"Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance."
---
Anthony De Mello.
"It takes a special energy, over and above one's creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled."
---
Oliver Sacks.
"Consciousness is already free of the problem you're trying to solve in this moment."
---
Sam Harris.
"Flowers fall even if we love them, and weeds grow even if we hate them."
---
Dogen Zenji.
"This very moment, this very world, this very body is the point. Now. You see? But, if you're seeking something beyond all the time, you never get with it. You're never here."
---
Alan Watts.
"Approach yourself with reverence and love. Relax and watch the 'I am'. Reality is just behind it. Keep quiet. Keep silent. It will emerge."
---
Nisargadatta Maharaj.
"The practice of meditation is to stop telling ourselves the story of our lives, and to fully connect with life in the present."
---
Sam Harris.
"No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen."
---
Alan Watts.
"There can be no centre in infinity."
---
Lucretius.
"Attention is your true source of wealth, even more than time - because you can waste time being distracted."
---
Sam Harris.
"Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself."
---
Matsuo Basho.
"The trick is to learn how to want the things you already have."
---
William B. Irvine.
"What is subject to death dies, and I am not exempt."
---
Buddha.
"Every moment of the day - indeed, every moment throughout one's life - offers an opportunity to be relaxed and responsive or to suffer unnecessarily."
---
Sam Harris.
"Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle."
---
John Watson.
"Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life."
---
Seneca.
"The feeling that you are in the driver's seat, able to pick and choose among thoughts, is itself a thought that has gone unrecognized."
---
Sam Harris.
"Somebody's boring me. I think it's me."
---
Dylan Thomas.
"Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy."
---
Thich Nhat Hanh.
"Few things under heaven are as instructive as the lessons of Silence."
---
Lao Tzu.
"The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook."
---
William James.
"This present moment is your opportunity--your only opportuity--to connect with your life."
---
Sam Harris.
"So much has been given to me I have not the time to ponder that which has been denied."
---
Helen Keller.
"As something, I am merely that thing.
As no-thing, I am all things."
---
Douglas Harding.
"In a world that has seen more than its fair share of chaos, create an island of calm where you currently are."
---
Sam Harris.
"Why am I in such a rush to get through life when I want so much to enjoy it?"
---
Jan Chozen Bays.
"Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable."
---
Anthony De Mello.
"If I know what I shall find, I do not want it.
Uncertainty is the salt of life."
---
Erwin Chargaff.
"The task we must set for ourselves is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity."
---
Erich Fromm.
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed that is not faced."
---
James Baldwin.
"I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence."
---
Frederick Douglass.
"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift."
---
Mary Oliver.
"It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway."
---
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
"If we are ever in doubt what to do, it is a good rule to ask ourselves what we shall wish on the morrow that we had done."
---
John Lubbock.
"For both ruin and recovery are from within."
---
Epictetus.
"In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration."
---
Aldous Huxley.
"Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it."
---
Alan Watts.
"Whatever comes, let it come.
What stays, let it stay.
What goes, let it go."
---
H. W. L. Poonja.
"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change."
---
Carl Rogers.
"You've got this one opportunity to fall in love with existence.
So, why not relax and enjoy your life?"
---
Sam Harris.
"The years teach much which the days never know."
---
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
"It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential."
---
Bruce Lee.
"If you are suffering, you are lost in thought."
---
Sam Harris.
"When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included?"
---
Mary Oliver.
"That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet."
---
Emily Dickinson.
"Imagination allows a feeling of delight to resonate within the cathedral of your mind."
---
William B. Irvine.
"The meaning of being alive is just being alive."
---
Alan Watts.
"To directly recognize how consciousness is in each moment, prior to any identification with thought, is the most important thing I've ever learned."
---
Sam Harris.
"Do not make being quiet into a task to be performed.
Relax.
There is nothing to practice."
---
Nisargadatta Maharaj.
"Wherever you are, that is the entry point."
---
Kabir.
"If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company."
---
Jean-Paul Sartre.
"Memory is a liar.
It's a heap of dog-eared, smudged, incessently revised fictions."
---
Peter Schjeldahl.
"The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves."
---
Pema Chodron.
"Wisdom tells me I am nothing.
Love tells me I am everything.
Between the two my life flows."
---
Nisargadatta Maharaj.
"Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the present moment."
---
Alan Watts.
"You're only as free as your attention is."
---
Sam Harris.
"To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together."
---
Barry Lopez.
"Now is simply now. You are simply you.
And tell me, since you want to leave the place where you are, where is it exactly you want to go?"
---
Kodo Sawaki.
"There's no sincere path you can take in life without having your heart broken."
---
David Whyte.
"The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have."
---
Henry James.
"As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die."
---
Federico Garcia Lorca.
"The whole process of liberation is to become less - to let go."
---
Joseph Goldstein.
"Embrace your losses as fair payment for the surplus of being alive."
---
Kieran Setiya.
"Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them."
---
Marcel Proust.
"There's nothing you can cling to.
No refuge.
Just let go, man."
---
Alan Watts.
"The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness.
And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream."
---
Kahil Gibran.
"It's such a lucky accident, having been born, that we're almost obliged to pay attention."
---
Mark Strand.
"Be still.
Throw away everything and be free.
Reality is everywhere- and to find it, you must first disappear."
---
H.W.L. Poonja.
"Just set one day's work in front of the last day's work.
That's the way it comes out.
And that's the only way it does."
---
John Steinback.
"We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life."
---
Nikos Kazantzakis.
"Gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without and beside us."
---
David Whyte.
"Whatever you know, whatever you believe, whatever you have done or hope to do - you have this moment of conscious life to contemplate."
---
Sam Harris.
"If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape 100 days of sorrow."
---
Chinese proverb.
"You can't define a person.
You can't sum anyone up.
Life is non-summative - it is infinite."
---
James Low.
"The real truth, that dare not speak itself, is that no one is in control.
Absolutely no one."
---
Terence McKenna.
"When you have accepted your own death in the midst of life, it means that you've let go of yourself, and you are therefore free.."
---
Alan Watts.
"If you can learn from your mistakes, then you have already transformed garbage into flowers."
---
Thich Nhat Hanh.
"For everything you do, there will be a last time that you do it."
---
William B. Irvine.
"See how letting go of the world is peaceful.
There's nothing you need to hold on to.
There's nothing you need to push away."
---
Buddha, read by Jayasara.
"Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest."
---
Herman Hesse.
"No matter how far you have gone down a wrong road, turn back."
---
Turkish proverb.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
---
Oscar Wilde.
"I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers."
---
Khalil Gibran.
"You're not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist, participating in their stillness, their immensity."
---
Louise Gluck.
"To be alive is to be present in the unfolding of life."
---
James Low.
"All experience is a play upon awareness - and this recognition is at once the path and the goal of practice."
---
Sam Harris.
"I am part of all that I have met."
---
Alfred Tennyson.
"Think positively about somebody else's well-being, and you'll find you're gladdening your own mind."
---
Laurie Santos.
"Why love what you will lose?
There is nothing else to love."
---
Louise Gluck.
"There is no other moment - no other reality but the one that's here.
Revel in this."
---
John Astin.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
---
George Bernard Shaw.
"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."
---
Alan Watts.
"Under one small star, my name is everyone and no one."
---
Wislawa Szymborska.
"Anything you have imposed on yourself to be unhappy is a concept.
So, give it away."
---
H.W.L Poonja, read by Jayasara on Waking Up.