Buddhism / Meditation / Spirituality Quotes
“Giving is to give away one’s wealth. Ethics is to help others. Patience is to have forsaken anger. Effort is enthusiasm for virtues. Concentration is unafflicted one-pointedness. Wisdom is ascertainment of the meaning of the truths. Compassion is a mind having the one savor of mercy for all sentient beings.”
– Nagarjuna, The Precious Garland: Advice for a King
“If someone knows how to swim, swimming in the waves is a joyful experience. But one who doesn’t know might even drown. Similarly, only someone who has assimilated spiritual principles can confidently face the challenging situations of life without breaking down. Just as armor protects the soldier, spiritual knowledge protects us from the difficulties we all have to face in life.” -Amma
“It’s very clear to me that this world isn’t going to be liberated from the clutches of the demon addiction by goody-goody heroes. It’s going to be saved by people who are a bit wicked, a bit dangerous, rather unpredictable and chaotic. People with sullied pasts and dirty hands. Shifty magic people. The kind of bodhisattvas who might just kill you in order to liberate you.” – Carolyn Elliott
“What you resist, persists.” – Carl G Jung
“Satori can be an anti-evolutionary event unless it takes place in an appropriate ethical, moral, and philosophical context. It can literally retard or stunt development and growth.”
“Yes, it tends to—unless it’s part of an ongoing transformative practice, and that means an integral practice. Because without a decent interpretation, context, or understanding, it sort of cements you at wherever you are…We have a lot of semi-enlightened schmucks running around because they got sealed in their schmuckiness when they got this sense of oneness.”
– Cohen and Wilber
“Giving is to give away one’s wealth. Ethics is to help others. Patience is to have forsaken anger. Effort is enthusiasm for virtues. Concentration is unafflicted one-pointedness. Wisdom is ascertainment of the meaning of the truths. Compassion is a mind having the one savor of mercy for all sentient beings.”
– Nagarjuna, The Precious Garland: Advice for a King
Futurism & Spirituality
A deeply resonate quote from Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association, in his 2002 book Authentic Happiness, on the nature of Life’s Evolutionary Process and how Humans can find Happiness, Purpose and Meaning in their lives:
“A [life] process that continually selects for more complexity is ultimately aimed at nothing less than omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness.
This is not, of course, fulfillment that will be achieved in our lifetimes, or even in the lifetime of our species. The best we can do as individuals is choose to be a small part of furthering this progress.
This is the door through which meaning that transcends us can enter our lives. A meaningful life is one that joins with something larger than we are — and the larger something is, the more meaning lives have.
Partaking in a process that has the bringing of a God who is endowed with omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness as its ultimate end joins our lives to an enormously large something.”
Life Purpose
‘Here’s what I discovered happens to you in life:
You will go through things, and while you’re going through them you can’t understand why they’re happening to you, but after you go through it, you look back it and you say,
“Oh, now I understand why I needed that lesson! I couldn’t understand it then, but after I got through it, then I saw how it was preparing me for bigger and better things!”
Has that ever happened to you?’
– Les Brown
“On many long journeys have I gone. And waited, too, for others to return from journeys of their own. Some return; some are broken; some come back so different only their names remain.”
– Yoda
“Most people don’t work on their dreams. Why? For many years I didn’t. One is because of fear. The fear of failure: what if things don’t work out? And the fear of success: what if they do, and I can’t handle it?… And the other thing is that most people don’t feel worthy. What I’m doing now, I could’ve been doing years ago. So I applaud you for your dreaming” – Les Brown
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long a the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us” – Helen Keller
“When things don’t work out for you. When things happen that you could not anticipate. What are the reasons that you can think of that can keep you strong.
You will never ever be successful, until you turn your pain into greatness, until you allow your pain to push you from where you are to push you to where you need to be. Stop running from your pain and embrace your pain. Your pain is going to be a part of your prize, a part of your product.” – Eric Thomas
“Observation of my life to date shows that the larger the number for whom I work, the more positively effective I become. Thus, it is obvious that if I work always and only for all humanity, I will be optimally effective.” – Buckminster Fuller
“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“Surround yourself with the dreamers and the doers, the believers and thinkers, but most of all, surround yourself with those who see greatness within you, even when you don’t see it yourself.”
“”When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world.
Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.
That’s a very limited life.
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again. ” – Steve Jobs
“Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning”
Meaning is far more important than happiness.
In fact, “It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.”
[Frankl’s message of] “meaning, the value of suffering, and responsibility to something greater than the self — seems to be at odds with our culture, which is more interested in the pursuit of individual happiness than in the search for meaning. “To the European,” Frankl wrote, “it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.” – Viktor Frankl, Man’s Pursuit of Meaning
“Present time can be hard, but life unfolds as it will and the universe will wait as we make our way into the unknown.
Our lives are guided by natural rhythms that are particular to each of us and cannot be altered by force of will alone. Life itself is a journey made up of processes and events that manifest before us only to be swept away when time marches on. Whether we envision ourselves creating a career, building a family, or developing the self, we instinctively know when the time has come for us to realize our dreams because all that is involved comes together harmoniously. When the time is right, the passage of destiny cannot be blocked. Yet as desperate as we are to touch these beautiful futures we have imagined, we cannot grow if we are not fully present in the evolutionary experience. The present can be challenging, uncomfortable, and tedious, but life unfolds as it will, and the universe will wait patiently as we make our way into the unknown.
The fate that awaits us is not dependent on our pace, which was preordained before we ever appeared in human guise. Therefore there is no reason to rush through life to reach those pinnacles of development associated with the paths we have chosen. Enjoying and fully experiencing the journey of life is as important as achieving goals and reaching milestones. There are lessons we can learn during those moments that seem immaterial or insignificant that we cannot learn at any other time. Appreciating these takes patience, however, because human beings tend to focus on the fulfillment of expectations rather than the simple joys of being.
Like many people, you have no doubt longed for a device that would give you the power to fast forward through certain periods of your existence. Yet haste is by its very nature vastly more stressful than serene fortitude. When you feel yourself growing impatient because the pace of your development is deceptively slow, remember that everything that will occur in your life will occur in its own time. Quelling your urge to rush will enable you to witness yourself learning, changing, and becoming stronger. There is so much to see and do in between the events and processes that we deem definitive. If you are patient enough to take pleasure in your existence’s unfolding, the journey from one pinnacle to the next will seem to take no time at all.” – Daily OM
Mark Twain’s Top 9 Tips for Living a Great Life:
1) “A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.”
2) “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
3) “Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing. Against laughter nothing can stand.”
4) “Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”
5) “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
6) “A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.”
7) “Drag your thoughts away from your troubles… by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.”
8) “The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.”
9) “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did so. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
If you don’t know your purpose, your purpose is to discover your purpose. – David Deida
Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men – John F. Kennedy
“A [life] process that continually selects for more complexity is ultimately aimed at nothing less than omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness.
This is not, of course, fulfillment that will be achieved in our lifetimes, or even in the lifetime of our species. The best we can do as individuals is choose to be a small part of furthering this progress.
This is the door through which meaning that transcends us can enter our lives. A meaningful life is one that joins with something larger than we are — and the larger something is, the more meaning lives have.
Partaking in a process that has the bringing of a God who is endowed with omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness as its ultimate end joins our lives to an enormously large something.” – Martin Seligman
Mastery & Greatness
“Don’t even use the word commit. Don’t even think about the word discipline. Just do the thing every single day whether you feel like it or not. You’re only commitment is to the actual activity. Not to the grand scheme, not to the big picture, not to the implications of what it is you’re doing. Your life really ends up being a composite of all the habits that you’ve developed. Habits are the building blocks of our lives. Not the goals or the grand schemes or the visions or the big idea; it’s what you do every fucking single day that matters more than anything. Develop good habits that will carry you through to having a very successful life.” – Elliott Hulse
“Greatness is not this wonderful, esoteric, elusive, god-like feature that only the special among us will ever taste – you know it’s something that truly exists in all of us. It’s very simple, this is what I believe and I’m willing to die for it. Period. It’s that simple. And that’s all I need to know, so from there you do what you need to do.” – Will Smith
“If you want to change who you are as a person, you have to believe in a future for yourself that is much bigger than your present.
Potential is the energy of change.” – Me
Success
“The number one difference between a Nobel Prize winner and others is not IQ or work ethic, but that they ask bigger questions.” – Peter Drucker
“We all have dreams, and if you’re out there and you have a dream and you want something, and you want something so bad, you have to risk everything, you have to risk being completely devastated if you don’t achieve it. And when you fall down you’ve gotta get back up.” – Abby Wambach before the U.S. women won the world cup.
” The Myth of the Overnight Success:
Angry Birds was Rovio’s 52nd game. They spent eight years and almost went bankrupt before finally creating their massive hit. Pinterest is one of the fastest growing websites in history, but struggled for a long time. Pinterest’s CEO recently said that they had “catastrophically small numbers” in their first year after launch, and that if he had listened to popular startup advice he probably would have quit.
You tend to hear about startups when they are successful but not when they are struggling. This creates a systematically distorted perception that companies succeed overnight. Almost always, when you learn the backstory, you find that behind every “overnight success” is a story of entrepreneurs toiling away for years, with very few people except themselves and perhaps a few friends, users, and investors supporting them.
Startups are hard, but they can also go from difficult to great incredibly quickly. You just need to survive long enough and keep going so you can create your 52nd game.” – Chris Dixon
Romantic Relationships
“Before I understood how to open with you, I tried giving you orgasms so I knew I was a good lover. But now, all I want is your surrender. I want your heart’s pleasure to ripple through your open body and saturate my life with your love. Your body’s openness to love’s flow draws me into you, and through your heart’s surrender I am opened to the love that lives as the universe. Whether you have an orgasm or not while we make love, your body’s trust and devotional openness is my secret doorway to love’s deepest bliss.” -From “Dear Lover,” a book by David Deida
“Why should a relationship mean settling down? Wait out for someone who won’t let life escape you, who’ll challenge you and drive you toward your dreams. Someone spontaneous you can get lost in the world with. A relationship, with the right person, is a release not a restriction. ”
– Beau Taplin
“When men are willing to meet women heart-first and to live from that divine place of kingly wisdom, warrior courage and boy-like vulnerability, we women are given the gift of receiving all of you.” – A Call to the Sacred Masculine
Brotherhood
“A man cannot truly know another man until he has gone to war alongside him.
But if he proves himself many times through the heat of battle, he can be trusted fully and completely.” – Me
Creativity
“You know, I didn’t write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them––well, I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That’s the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies.” – Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work
“Dancing—even for a few minutes—increases my vitality, makes me feel larger, freer, more joyful, more exploratory, more alive. I’m in love with dance because the simple act of moving my body around its edges and then beyond its normal boundaries broadens and deepens my perception of reality and expands my sense of self. When I dance, the self that appears is non-verbal and broader and bigger and more timeless and nothing like ordinary consciousness for me. In certain instances, dance seems to enable me to completely break free of the confines of the self. It’s a real meditative rest from my thinking mind.” – Peggy La Cerra
“When I talk to young composers, I tell them, I know that you’re all worried about finding your voice. Actually you’re going to find your voice. By the time you’re 30, you’ll find it. But that’s not the problem. The problem is getting rid of it. You have to find an engine for change. And that’s what collaborative work does. Whatever we do together will make us different.” – Philip Glass
Philosophy
“If you want to converse with me, first define your terms” – Voltaire
“Meaning is an interpretation we bring to experience.” – Susanne Cook Greuter
