Meditation Quotes

498 Sourced quotes

Enlarge this meditation upon this great world, man, so far, as to consider the immensity of the creatures this world produces; our creatures are our thoughts, creatures that are born giants; that reach from east to west, from earth to heaven, that do not only bestride all the sea and land, but span the sun and firmament at once; my thoughts reach all, comprehend all. Inexplicable mystery; I their creator am in a close prison, in a sick bed, anywhere, and any one of my creatures, my thoughts, is with the sun, and beyond the sun, overtakes the sun, and overgoes the sun in one pace, one step, everywhere.

Walk in Christ's light daily through fidelity to personal and liturgical prayer, nourished by meditation on the inspired word of God.. Make the daily celebration of the Eucharist the center of your life.

Pope Benedict XVI

Prayer is asking for guidance. Meditation is listening to it.

Sonia Choquette

Breathing meditation can quiet the mind, open the body, and develop a great power of concentration.

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

Prayer can assume very different forms, from quiet, blessed contemplation of God, in which eye meets eye in restful meditation, to deep sighs or sudden exclamations of wonder, joy, gratitude or adoration.

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

Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries — stand that man upon his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.... Meditation and water are wedded forever.

Herman Melville

The more intense the nature of a man, the more readily will he find meditation, and the more successfully will he practice it.

If we are at war with our parents, our family, our society, or our church, there is probably a war going on inside us also, so the most basic work for peace is to return to ourselves and create harmony among the elements within us - our feelings, our perceptions, and our mental states. That is why the practice of meditation, looking deeply, is so important.

Be mindful 24 hours a day, not just during the one hour you may allot for formal meditation or reading scripture and reciting prayers. Each act must be carried out in mindfulness.

One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are. That's not considered to be a problem. The point is to see it.

Intuition of truth, not preceded by perceptible meditation, is genius.

Meditation is to be aware of what is going on in your body, in your feelings, in your mind, and in the world.

Petting, scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditation and almost as good for the soul as prayer.

In other words, the idea of the philosopher's stone of the alchemists is identical with the idea of the glorified body. This offers an archetypal approach to some Eastern ideas, because in different Eastern yoga practices and meditation the goal is to produce within oneself the so-called diamond body which is an immortal nucleus of the personality.

Marie-Louise von Franz

We wouldn't attempt to meditate, or engage in any other contemplative practice, if we didn't feel that something about our experience needed to be improved. But here lies one of the central paradoxes of spiritual life, because this very feeling of dissatisfaction causes us to overlook the intrinsic freedom of consciousness in the present. As we have seen, there are good reasons to believe that adopting a practice like meditation can lead to positive changes in one's life. But the deepest goal of spirituality is freedom from the illusion of the self—and to seek such freedom, as though it were a future state to be attained through effort, is to reinforce the chains of one's apparent bondage in each moment.

Religious practice provides three... mythological methods of coming to terms with spiritual reality and finding the treasure within it. One way is to study the myth in its historical context... And for modern Christians this means trying to see the psychological meaning of myth in the development of human consciousness. A second way is through ritual in which the mythological story is acted out... And third, he can sometimes step into the myth imaginatively through meditation, actually entering the spiritual world... and becoming active and effective in it.

No amount of meditation, yoga, diet, and reflection will make all of our problems go away, but we can transform our difficulties into our practice until little by little they guide us on our way.

Someone once inquired of a Far Eastern Zen master, who had a great serenity and peace about him no matter what pressures he faced, "How do you maintain that serenity and peace?" He replied, "I never leave my place of meditation." He meditated early in the morning and for the rest of the day, he carried the peace of those moments with him in his mind and heart.

Devote the mind to confusion and we know only too well, if we're honest, that it will become a dark master of confusion, adept in its addictions, subtle and perversely supple in its slaveries. Devote it in meditation to the task of freeing itself from illusion, and we will find that, with time, patience, discipline, and the right training, our mind will begin to unknot itself and know its essential bliss and clarity.

Sogyal Rinpoche

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonderchild.

Divine incarnations do not come to bring a new or exclusive religion, but to restore the One Religion of God-realization.
Many are the churches and temples founded in his name, often prosperous and powerful, but where is the communion that he stressed — actual contact with God? Jesus wants temples to be established in human souls, first and foremost; then established outwardly in physical places of worship. Instead, there are countless huge edifices with vast congregations being indoctrinated in churchianity, but few souls who are really in touch with Christ through deep prayer and meditation.

Paramahansa Yogananda

So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.