Eknath Easwaran Quotes

45 Sourced Quotes

As we get deeper, we move closer and closer to other people; we feel closer to life as a whole.

Eknath Easwaran
The real essentials of life - compassion, kindness, good will, forgiveness - are what is fundamental to living as a true human being.

Eknath Easwaran
When we meditate every morning we are putting on armor for the day's battle against our own impatience, inadequacy, resentment, and hostility.

Eknath Easwaran
Wherever people gather for selfless ends, there is a vast augmentation of their individual capacities. Something wonderful, something momentous happens. An irresistible force begins to move, which, though we may not see it, is going to change our world. In this lies the power and the meaning of spiritual companionship.

Eknath Easwaran
When we are at home with ourselves, we are at home everywhere in the world. When we have found peace within ourselves, peace and love follow us wherever we go.

Eknath Easwaran
By removing that which is petty and self-seeking, we bring forth all that is glorious and mindful of the whole.

Eknath Easwaran
Don't think the purpose of meditation is to go deep into consciousness, wrap a blanket around yourself, and say, 'How cozy! I'm going to curl up in here by myself; let the world burn.' Not at all. We go deep into meditation so that we can reach out further and further to the world outside.

Eknath Easwaran
The spiritual life is a call to action. But it is a call to... action without any selfish attachment to the results.

Eknath Easwaran
By giving full attention to one thing at a time, we can learn to direct attention where we choose.

Eknath Easwaran
Having come to realize in the first stage of meditation that we are not our bodies, in the second stage we make an even more astounding discovery; we are not our minds either.

Eknath Easwaran
Activity is not achievement. It is not enough to rush about beginning a lot of things and keeping busy. A well-spent life is one that rounds out what it has begun.

Eknath Easwaran
In memorizing the prayer, it may be helpful to remind yourself that you are not addressing some extraterrestrial being outside you. The kingdom of heaven is within us, and the Lord is enshrined in the depths of our own consciousness. In this prayer we are calling deep into ourselves, appealing to the spark of the divine that is our real nature.

Eknath Easwaran
There are three kinds of violence: one, through our deeds; two, through our words; and three, through our thoughts. …The root of all violence is in the world of thoughts, and that is why training the mind is so important.

Eknath Easwaran
It is not action or effort that we must surrender; it is self-will, and this is terribly difficult. You must do your best constantly, yet never allow yourself to become involved in whether things work out the way you want.

Eknath Easwaran
Do not feed your ego and your problems, with your attention....Slowly, surely, the ego will lose weight, until one fine day it will be nothing but a thin ghost of its former self. You will be able to see right through it, to the divine presence that shines in each of us.

Eknath Easwaran
When we go slower, we are more patient and when we are more patient we have a choice in how we respond.

Eknath Easwaran
Human relationships are the perfect tool for sanding away our rough edges and getting at the core of divinity within us.

Eknath Easwaran
Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny private, shell-bound realm - which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world.

Eknath Easwaran
As meditation deepens, compulsions, cravings and fits of emotion begin to lose their power to dictate our behavior. We see clearly that choices are possible; we can say yes or we can say no. It is profoundly liberating.

Eknath Easwaran
Every angry thought makes it a little easier to get angry the next time, and a little more likely.

Eknath Easwaran
We have to have a purpose greater than the endless struggle to satisfy personal desires.

Eknath Easwaran
When someone at peace and free from hurry enters a room, that person has a calming effect on everyone present.

Eknath Easwaran
An unhurried mind brings the capacity to make wise choices every day - choices of how we use our time, of where we place our resources and our love. I am not just talking about avoiding the rat race, but about a life full of an artistic beauty - a life that has almost vanished from modern civilization, but is quite within the reach of everyone.

Eknath Easwaran
Imagine a hot tub for the mind. That is what meditation is; it can bathe your mind in relaxing thoughts.

Eknath Easwaran
At the beginning of every winter people are careful to install storm windows. These extra panes of glass protect their houses against the bitter winds. We do something very similar to protect our minds through the practice of meditation.

Eknath Easwaran