Motivational Quotes
“You will have to take 100 percent responsibility. And whenever you accept 100 percent responsibility, you become free, and then there is no bondage in this world. In fact, anger is a kind of bondage. I cannot be angry, because I am not in bondage. I have not been angry with anybody for years, because I don’t make anybody else responsible. I am free, so why should I be angry? If I want to be sad, it is my freedom. If I want to be happy, it is my freedom. Freedom cannot be afraid, freedom cannot be angry. Once you know that you are your world, you have penetrated into a different kind of understanding. Then nothing else matters—all else is games and excuses.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 318)
“The real bravery, the real fight, is not outside. The real fight is inside, it is an inner conquest. Although Alexander may have been a great warrior, as far as his own instincts were concerned, he was a slave. Napoleon may have been a great soldier, but as far as his own anger, lust, and possessiveness were concerned, he was just as ordinary as anybody else. The really brave ones are Jesus, Buddha, Patanjali—these types of people. They have overcome themselves. Now no desire can pull them here and there, now no unconscious instinct can have any power over them. They are masters of their own lives.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 317)
“We spend our lives lost in thought. The question is, what should we make of this fact? In the West, the answer has been ‘Not much.’ In the East, especially in contemplative traditions like those of Buddhism, being distracted by thought is understood to be the very wellspring of human suffering. From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It’s a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. It is essentially a form of psychosis. Thoughts themselves are not a problem, but being identified with thought is. Taking oneself to be the thinker of one’s thoughts—that is, not recognizing the present thought to be a transitory appearance in consciousness—is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human conflict and unhappiness. It doesn’t matter if your mind is wandering over current problems in set theory or cancer research; if you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up (Page 101)
“Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought. This is a remarkable fact about the human mind. We are capable of astonishing feats of understanding and creativity. We can endure almost any torment. But it is not within our power to simply stop talking to ourselves, whatever the stakes. It’s not even in our power to recognize each thought as it arises in consciousness without getting distracted every few seconds by one of them. Without significant training in meditation, remaining aware—of anything—for a full minute is just not in the cards.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up (Page 100)
“If, like many people, you tend to be vaguely unhappy much of the time, it can be very helpful to manufacture a feeling of gratitude by simply contemplating all the terrible things that have not happened to you, or to think of how many people would consider their prayers answered if they could only live as you are now. The mere fact that you have the leisure to read this book puts you in a very rarefied company. Many people on earth at this moment can’t even imagine the freedom that you currently take for granted.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up (Page 96)
“A woman once came to Gandhi with her child, concerned about her child’s habit of eating too much sugar. Knowing how much her child respected Gandhi, she asked him, ‘Could you please tell my daughter to stop eating sugar?’ Gandhi listened and then replied, ‘Please come back in two weeks.’ The woman and her child returned two weeks later. This time, Gandhi simply told the child, ‘Please do not eat sugar.’ Grateful, the mother thanked him, but she couldn’t help asking, ‘Why did we need to wait two weeks for you to say that?’ Gandhi said, ‘Two weeks ago, I was eating sugar.’“
Unknown
“My suffering was entirely the product of my thoughts. Whatever the needs of the moment, I had a choice: I could do what was required calmly, patiently, and attentively, or do it in a state of panic. 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, Waking Up (Page 95)
Identity is tricky. You need it to have a frame of reference that helps you interact with the world, but too much identity and added labels will push you away from the truth of impermanence. Wisdom will welcome you to its home, but you have to disarm yourself before you enter. Wisdom will find you ready and worthy when you let go of all ideas and views. You can only enter when you are ready to observe yourself without judgment and without a perception that is hampered by the past. Understanding yourself is one thing, but timeless wisdom asks you to take a step further by letting go of everything.
Yung Pueblo
“In my view, the realistic goal to be attained through spiritual practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of no further efforts but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst of whatever is happening. If you can do that, you have already solved most of the problems you will encounter in life.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up (Page 49)
“We are made alone. That aloneness is our freedom. And it is not against love. In fact, only a person who is alone and knows how to be alone will be able to love. This is the paradox of love: That only the person who is alone can love, and only the person who loves becomes alone. They come together. So if you are not capable of being alone, you will not be capable of being in love either. Then all your so-called love will be just an escape from yourself. It will not be real love, it will not be real relating. Who will relate with whom? You have not even related with yourself; how can you relate with the other? You are not there—who is going to relate with others? So a false kind of love exists in the world: You are trying to escape from yourself, the other is trying to escape from herself or himself, and you are both seeking shelter in each other. It is a mutual deception.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 312)
“In one sense, the Buddhist concept of enlightenment really is just the epitome of ‘stress reduction’—and depending on how much stress one reduces, the results of one’s practice can seem more or less profound. According to the Buddhist teachings, human beings have a distorted view of reality that leads them to suffer unnecessarily. We grasp at transitory pleasures. We brood about the past and worry about the future. We continually seek to prop up and defend an egoic self that doesn’t exist. This is stressful—and spiritual life is a process of gradually unraveling our confusion and bringing this stress to an end. According to the Buddhist view, by seeing things as they are, we cease to suffer in the usual ways, and our minds can open to states of well-being that are intrinsic to the nature of consciousness.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up (Page 48)
“In the beginning of one’s meditation practice, the difference between ordinary experience and what one comes to consider ‘mindfulness’ is not very clear, and it takes some training to distinguish between being lost in thought and seeing thoughts for what they are. In this sense, learning to meditate is just like acquiring any other skill. It takes many thousands of repetitions to throw a good jab or to coax music from the strings of a guitar. With practice, mindfulness becomes a well-formed habit of attention, and the difference between it and ordinary thinking will become increasingly clear. Eventually, it begins to seem as if you are repeatedly awakening from a dream to find yourself safely in bed. No matter how terrible the dream, the relief is instantaneous. And yet it is difficult to stay awake for more than a few seconds at a time.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up (Page 37)
“Be present to it all: Welcome it and be with all the feels. Don’t make the situation or yourself wrong. Without resistance to what it is, you’ll feel more in your power. Being present in the moment also helps reduce anxiety about the future. Engage in activities that help you stay grounded, such as meditation, exercise, or spending time in nature.”
Nat Couropmitree | Read Matt’s Blog on this Quote ↗
“Life can only be lived dangerously—there is no other way to live it. It is only through danger that life attains maturity, growth. One needs to be an adventurer, always ready to risk the known for the unknown. That’s what being a seeker is all about. But once one has tasted the joys of freedom and fearlessness, one never repents because then one knows what it means to live at the optimum. Then one knows what it means to burn your life’s torch from both ends together. And even a single moment of that intensity is more gratifying than a whole eternity of mediocre living.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 310)
“The principal enemy of mindfulness—or of any meditative practice—is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts. The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing that we are thinking. In fact, thoughts of all kinds can be perfectly good objects of mindfulness. In the early stages of one’s practice, however, the arising of thought will be more or less synonymous with distraction—that is, with a failure to meditate. Most people who believe they are meditating are merely thinking with their eyes closed. By practicing mindfulness, however, one can awaken from the dream of discursive thought and begin to see each arising image, idea, or bit of language vanish without a tract. What remains is consciousness itself, with its attendant sights, sounds, sensations, and thoughts appearing and changing in every moment.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up (Page 36)
“There is nothing passive about mindfulness. One might even say that it expresses a specific kind of passion—a passion for discerning what is subjectively real in every moment. It is a mode of cognition that is, above all, undistracted, accepting, and (ultimately) nonconceptual. Being mindful is not a matter of thinking more clearly about experience; it is the act of experiencing more clearly, including the arising of thoughts themselves. Mindfulness is a vivid awareness of whatever is appearing in one’s mind or body—thoughts, sensations, moods—without grasping at the pleasant or recoiling from the unpleasant. One of the great strengths of this technique of meditation, from a secular point of view, is that it does not require us to adopt any cultural affectations or unjustified beliefs. It simply demands that we pay close attention to the flow of experience in each moment.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up (Page 36)
“One of the most satisfying feelings I know — and also one of the most growth-promoting experiences for the other person — comes from my appreciating this individual in the same way that I appreciate a sunset. People are just as wonderful as sunsets if I can let them be. In fact, perhaps the reason we can truly appreciate a sunset is that we cannot control it. When I look at a sunset as I did the other evening, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a little on the right hand corner, and put a bit more purple along the base, and use a little more pink in the cloud color.’ I don’t do that. I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch it with awe as it unfolds. I like myself best when I can appreciate my staff member, my son, my daughter, my grandchildren, in this same way.”
Carl Rogers
“The literature on [the] psychological benefits [of mindfulness] is now substantial. There is nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply the state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness.”
Sam Harris, Waking Up (Page 35)