Meditation Quotes

498 Sourced quotes

Since inner peace is the source of all happiness, we can see how important meditation is.

This is the central principle of meditation: we become what we meditate on.

Eknath Easwaran

Regard the heart as a vast field. Use the mind as a plough. Treat the gunas (qualities) as bullocks. Use the intelligence (Viveka) as a whip. With these aids, cultivate the field of your heart. What is the crop that is to be grown in it? Sathya, Dharma, Santhi and Prema are the crops. Bhakthi is the rain, meditation is the manure, Brahmananda is the crop.

Sathya Sai Baba

The mandalas were meant to be objects of contemplation, aids to meditation, their proportions magically balanced to purify and calm the mind. To stare at a mandala was to experience, if only briefly, the nothingness that is at the heart of enlightenment.

Douglas Preston

Meditation is not meant to help us avoid problems or run away from difficulties. It is meant to allow positive healing to take place. To meditate is to learn how to stop—to stop being carried away by our regrets about the past, our anger or despair in the present, or our worries about the future.

Meditation, in all its forms and traditions, is an invitation to listen, to open, to quietly enlist the courage to be touched and formed by life.

Meditation is a time to focus, train the mind, and bring it to stillness. It is not a time to rest and relax.

Studies by Andrew Newberg and others have shown that long-term practice of meditation produces significant alterations in cerebral blood flow in parts of the brain related to attention, emotion, and some autonomic functions.

Meditation, stillness, time simply to 'be', to do nothing at all and to do it with joy

In every scientific question, even with the most intense meditation, men find that they soon come to the limits of new thoughts; a barrier, like a prison chamber, rises in every direction, which is impassable until new experiments are made, or new knowledge which bears upon the question is attained.

Meditation means to look deeply, to touch deeply, so we can realize we are already home.

When people say that meditation makes them calm, they are often referring to this stability of the mind. A stable mind creates the foundation for a happier and more contented person.

Take some time to be silent and repeat the sound of God as an inner mantra. Meditation allows you to make conscious contact with your Source and achieve success in every area. If a problem arises, then go within, get very quiet about it and find the answers inside of you

When I was going into one of my first meditation retreats, I asked my father, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, for some advice. He said, "How you act when you're alone affects the rest of your life." Even in solitude, the ruler engages in virtue.

A garment that is double dyed, dipped again and again, will retain the color a great while; so a truth which is the subject of meditation.

Meditation is the straight flight of the mind to the Kingdom of Heaven present in the heart of everyone.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

See here, how fresh is the air, there is the Ganga, and the Sadhus (holy men) are practising meditation, and holding lofty talks! While the moment you will go to Calcutta, you will be thinking of nasty stuff.

Swami Vivekananda

Meditation is not supposed to be the fabrication or the reinforcement of some particular state, but simply the cultivation of the awareness of whatever is arising in the mind.

Thrangu Rinpoche

The soil in which the meditative mind can begin is the soil of everyday life, the strife, the pain, and the fleeting joy. It must begin there, and bring order, and from there move endlessly... You must take a plunge into the water, not knowing how to swim. And the beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are, where you are going, what the end is.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

To think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life-daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.

If we are engaged in actions that cause pain and conflict to ourselves and others, it is impossible for the mind to become settled, collected, and focused in meditation; it is impossible for the heart to open.

Meditation is not spacing-out or running away. In fact, it is being totally honest with ourselves.

Kathleen McDonald

Prayer is the peace of our spirit, the stillness of our thoughts, the evenness of recollection, the seat of meditation, the rest of our cares and the calm of our tempest; prayer is the issue of a quiet mind, of untroubled thoughts, it is the daughter of charity, and the sister of meekness.

What meditation does mean is a way for us to unlock and open the door to the kingdom of heaven. Jesus began his ministry by proclaiming that this holy kingdom was within us and among us.

Morton T. Kelsey

Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.