Meditation Quotes

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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.

Next to meditation is music, soulful music, the music that stirs and elevates our aspiring consciousness.

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.

Here is, in truth, the whole secret of Yoga, the science of the soul. The active turnings, the strident vibrations, of selfishness, lust and hate are to be stilled by meditation, by letting heart and mind dwell in spiritual life, by lifting up the heart to the strong, silent life above, which rests in the stillness of eternal love, and needs no harsh vibration to convince it of true being.

Man is distinguished from the brute animals in proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect:--for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Training our mind through meditation does not mean forcibly subjugating it or beating it into shape.

Sharon Salzberg

Seek in reading and thou shalt find in meditation; knock in prayer and it shall be opened in contemplation.

John of the Cross