I've been collecting quotes since my early path days, so this'll be a long one.
Assorted / Unknown
“I have come to think of the practice, or at least my practice, as learning the art of dying into the world. A habitual dying that stands opposed to trying to stay alive.” – Raphael Scullion
“The sun is always shining behind the clouds.”
“You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going ‘a most judicious choice, sire.’” – Steven Kaas
“Perfectionism is so widespread in this culture that we actually have had to invent another word for love. 'Unconditional love,' we say. Yet, all love is unconditional. Anything else is just approval.” – Rachel Remen
“The simplest thing is to realize that it's literally just learning to deeply deeply relax while maintaining consciousness.” – Doug Tataryn
“Instructing his monks, the master said: Followers of the Way, it is most important that you come to see clearly. Then you can go your way and confront the world, without letting yourselves be deceived by those delusive fox sprites. Nothing is more precious than to be a man who has nothing further to seek. Just do not give rise to any fancies, and be your ordinary selves.”
“All of you: first stop all causal relationships, and bring the ten thousand affairs to rest.”
“You can’t win.”
"Non-action does not mean doing nothing and keeping silent. Let everything be allowed to do what it naturally does, so that its nature will be satisfied." – Zhang Zhou
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.” – Mark Twain
“Most of the big shifts I had happened through deepening degrees of relaxation and release that allowed for insights to dawn.” – Will G
“No one is to blame for this present moment.” – On the Path to NoWhere
“I do not know bad people, I only know myself.” – Nisargadatta
"You are afraid to surrender because you don't want to lose control — but you never had control. All you had was anxiety" – Elizabeth Gilbert
“In the end, you come to see that everything you are holding on to is unnecessary. You learn to witness and let go. That letting go is the opening to peace.” – Dipa Ma
“None of us know how to influence events, however hard we try.” - Bonnie Greenwell
“Take care of the dharma, and the dharma will take care of you” – Joseph Goldstein
He was asked, "How does a crude man become sensitive?" and answered, "If I say the mind is crude and I try to become sensitive, the very effort is to become sensitive is crudity. Please see this. Don't be intrigued, but watch it. Whereas, if I recognize that I am crude without wanting to change, without trying to become sensitive, if I begin to understand what crudeness is, observe it in my life from day to day -- the greedy way I eat, the roughness with which I treat people, the pride, the arrogance, the coarseness of my habits and thoughts --- then that very observation transforms what is… You do not have to become sensitive. The man who is trying to become something is ugly, insensitive, he is a crude person." – Krishnamurti
“I earnestly believe there is no such thing as willpower, it is a collective delusion that recasts differences in how hard something is for different people as a kind of moral virtue.” – Cate Hall
“Beginner meditation instructions: Get one state, not another (concentration, jhana, boundarilessness, etc.). Advanced meditation instructions: Stop caring which state you're in. Scattered mind, concentrated mind, contracted self, expanded self, etc., are all equally samsara.” – Tucker Peck
“The bottom 1% and the top 1% of productive people have 0 control over their actions. They are both driven entirely by impulse.” – @wordgrammer
“A meditator leaves the mind alone, in its natural state.” – Milarepa
“No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.” – Alan Watts
“Whatever happens to you is none of your business” – Toni Packer
“Your life is not your own” – Rumi
Ajahn Chah
Ajahn Chah’s manifestation was the laughter of wisdom. Whether with generals or ministers, farmers or cooks, he would say, “When I see how much people are struggling, I look at them with great sympathy and ask, ‘Are you suffering? Ahhh, you must be very attached. Why not let go?’” His teachings were deep and straight to the point. He’d say, “If you let go a little, you’ll be a little happy. If you let go a lot, you’ll be a lot happy. If you let go completely, you’ll be completely happy.” He saw suffering, its cause, and that freedom is possible in any moment. He expressed enlightenment as wisdom.
Angelo Dulilo
“Suffering is the conviction that things could be other than they are.”
Adyashanti
“Do it (any pleasure, craving, etc.) all you want, it just won't make you happy. Believe it (any belief, thought, etc.) all you want, that just won't actually make it true.”
“The desire to control is, ultimately, our unwillingness to just be awake.”
“From acceptance is where transformation happens. Nothing transforms until we accept it.”
“Life sustains itself. Let go of the ego and life takes care of itself through you.”
Bahiya Baby
“Then third path is when you start to recognize oh I'm attached to attention and maybe can afford to loosen my grip on it a little. Now it's like noticing I don't need to pay attention to be aware and that chronic attending actually creates suffering.”
“I've spent my whole life craving something that doesn't exist.”
“I just had a persistent assumption that I needed to make some kind of decision about reality and that that decision has some massive existential significance.”
Chris Marti
“It let me sleep last night. I think of this, whatever it is, as "it." It is nameless, faceless, inexorable, uncontrollable, unpredictable, unbelievable, irresponsible, implacable, un-caring and unwilling to let "me" have any say. Good for it!
Someone e-mailed me yesterday and asked me if I regretted letting it into my life. Hell no! It is the best teacher I could ever hope to have. It is working very hard to show me how to let go."
“Also -- I've been thinking about self-image lately. I used to think I was a thing, separate, alone, unique, with complete freedom from everything and everyone. I had the power. It was in my hands. There was, in my head, a big me and a little universe. Big me was responsible for everything, pretty much. That sounds amazing, to have the power, right? In practice it meant fear. It was nightmarish. I was afraid almost all the time, and fear drove many of the bigger life decisions I would make. I wouldn't have admitted that, and I might not even have known it consciously if you had asked me. But it was true. Absolutely true.”
“Matt, your mind will ALWAYS be all over the place. The benefit of practice isn't to change the mind. The benefit of practice is to understand the mind. If you relax into this practice, accepting the mind for what it is and explore from there, you'll be fine.”
"I just listened to the Harris podcast. He's describing consciousness as an uninterrupted experience from its own POV. From my personal POV consciousness is a series of moment-to-moment experiences that arise one by one, not one uninterrupted stream. He keeps using the word "continuum." It seems to me he's presenting a philosophical argument, not an experiential one, that comes from the mind that narrates our experience, the mind that is discursive. Maybe It's a western proclivity. Yes, consciousness, from its own narrative POV, "sees" no interruption, no birth, no death - because consciousness does not experience those. So the view of consciousness presented in Harris' podcast assumes an uninterrupted stream of experience that is, in Buddhist terms, ignorance. But we can see how our experience is constructed, second by second. It's not a smooth, uninterrupted flow, but rather a rapid, staccato series of creations that are interpreted by the conscious mind as a flow. So every tiny moment is new and brings a new consciousness to bear. Harris seems to reject this experiential, moment-to-moment version of consciousness, or maybe he and I have a different definition of the word."
"Focus on the difference between “should” and “is.” We don't live in the world of “should.’”
“I reached a point where watching perception was ‘old hat,’ which is why it was suggested to me to switch from vipassana to a jhana oriented practice. I firmly believe, and have since coached others on this, that at the late third path juncture we need to relax and accept what's happening from moment to moment. We have, by that time. fully grokked the nano-second to nano-second nature of perception, and we can cite the process chapter and verse. If you read my meditation diary you'll see that at this point in my practice it was more like solving a mystery, plumbing the depths in a more metaphysical way, as opposed to continuing to examine experience with a microscope. It appears that then the mind has a different kind of grokking to do - it has to uncover and upend the last, very, very deeply held and hidden assumption that keeps us from seeing the truth of experience.”
Daniel Ingram
“Your goal should be on clearly seeing the present moment. Don’t get hung up on some future thing.”
“Thus, my advice when on an insight meditation retreat is to power the investigation skillfully all day long, whether you are sitting, walking, reclining, standing, eating, washing, etc., until you get stable enough to realize that reality is happening on its own and just gently be with that.”
“Allow the actual sensations that seem to make up the feeling of wanting itself to be directly understood as and where they are.”
"It is not quite that the self is a construct void of meaning, it is that all meanings/interpretations and sensations, including those that involve "self" both perceptually and inferentially, are simply arising naturally, vanishing naturally, utterly transient, utterly interdependent, not separate, not stable, not in anyone's control, just naturally happening all together, knowing themselves all the way through, occurring where and as they do, utterly ungraspable or fixable, just part of the qualities that arise."
“It is not that we just serve the world, it is that compassion is baked into the experiential universe as the intrinsic motivation to reduce suffering.”
Frank Yang
“That's all you have to do: observe and relax. Everything else takes care of itself.”
George S
“It gets even more interesting when you consider the fact that your experience can’t be anything other than what it already is in the present moment. How is craving even possible? It’s just making a lot of effort to push or pull on a string which is not attached to anything at the other end - effort for effort’s sake purely to maintain the illusion that a permanent entity exists which is making the effort! In that sense craving is also an illusion. It feels damn real until you realize that there’s no one actually doing the craving, then it’s just another feeling happening by itself, much less of a problem. That’s another way to back yourself into radical acceptance - seeing that you are trying to reject something which is not even happening anyway the way you think it is.”
“I’m not thinking like I used to ‘what do I want out of the rest of my life,’ it’s more like ‘what does life want out of me.’”
Hokai Sobol
“The idealistic notion of ‘beyond’ is used quite indiscriminately in spiritual lingo. Is ‘in the midst of’ not where it all ends up?”
“There’s always the danger of self-improvement. #thingsisaywhenmentoring”
“Change and improvement mostly come from below, not from on high. True in society, but also with individual experience.”
Joe Hudson
“Overwhelm is what happens when we think we have to step out of flow to manage reality.”
“The problem with getting good at managing your life is that you end up with a life that has to be managed.”
“How addicted are you to quitting your addictions?”
“Shame is the lock that holds the chains of bad habits in place.”
Kavi Banks
“As we let go of resistance and detoxify our lives—emotionally, mentally, and physically—something profound begins to rise within us. This is not the result of striving for awakening, but rather the natural wisdom that emerges from deep surrender and commitment to the process.”
“True transformation requires us to relinquish our attachments, our desires to hold on to certain aspects of ourselves or our lives. We cannot straddle two worlds, holding onto the old while seeking the new. Instead, we are called to let go of everything that no longer serves us, creating space for the divine to enter fully.”
Kenneth Folk
“[There are] two modes of attention: experiential focus and narrative focus.”
“This is what these FMRI studies continue to find: you can perform neurosurgery on yourself by again and again shifting the mode from the narrative to the experience.”
“[T]he fears themselves were tolerable; it was the effort to avoid them that I could not endure.”
Mark (@meditationstuff)
“one has to allow themselves to be anything--flawed, ridiculous, crazy, embarrassing, wretched, a failure, fantastical, childish, detached from reality, always more until/unless there isn't, radically patiently, anything--however oneself and others happen to be, right now, and now.”
“paradoxically, if one doesn't like something about oneself, the best way to change it might be to fully accept it, to gently explore how to be willing to have it, to be ok having it, forever ("maybe this is it").”
“One accepts even rejection in order to eventually make acceptance instead of rejection safe. If we reject rejection that will cause fixation in the rejection! One might explore how it can be ok to reject something forever, and in eventual safe acceptance of that rejection then rejection potentially becomes labile towards acceptance.)”
Martin
“The future is completely imaginary, so I try not to get hung up on it.”
“A few weeks ago I found that I could do something, or perhaps I should say, not do something, that I could not before. Basically, for years I have been getting caught up in what I think of as the infinite regress trap. The mind sees a subject/object duality sees the pull (tanha) that makes it happen or, if caught later, the fuel (upadana) that keeps it going, and having seen it, deidentifies with it or renounces it. This is great. But it leaves, in its wake, a new subject/object duality of the witness of that now-extinguished process. As that witnessing experience is seen for the subject/object duality it is, a new witnessing experience takes shape, and so on. Infinite regress, until a new contact arises and pulls the mind into an unrelated duality.
Anyway, after all those years of noticing this trap, I have found the way out. Unfortunately, there is nothing to describe here. There is nothing to do to end the regress. It cannot be released without creating a releaser, it cannot be softened into without creating a softener. There is no maneuver. No one weird trick :-) It ends by itself but I cannot explain why it ends by itself now and it did not before. I think I bumped into this off the cushion and then started practicing it on the cushion, but I cannot really remember. Anyway, it gets practiced a lot now. The end state, by the way, is not a cosmic wow. It is equanimous. In fact, if I do it in bed at night, the result is often sleep.”
Meister Eckhart
“God created the world in the eternal present, such that everything is still being created. This is a continuous project.”
Nick Cammarata
“you’re being told the story of your life, and any resistance to the present moment of experience just clogs the system and causes suffering, the story doesn’t want to be interfered with”
“they should invent an unconditional happiness that’s easier than letting go of everything including your basic survival instinct”
Roger Thisdell
“People report updating their understanding of what states are preferable, similarly as they go through the jhanas. Once you've gone from jhana one, characterised by extreme pleasant sensations, to jhana four, characterised by pervading equanimity or 'neither-pleasure-nor-pain', you realise that deep peace is actually preferable to fiery rapturous ecstasy. And then once you've sufficiently passed through nirodha and processed its significance, you understand that actually 'lights-out' tops everything. The recontextualisation of all mind moments that occurs after nirodha can cause many to conclude "that was it", understood in the profoundest meanings of the words.”
“First, I tried to change reality.
Second, I tried to simply understand reality.
Third, I stopped trying to do either.
And then life revealed itself to itself as itself.”
Robert Adams
“The only thing that you should do, or must do, is not to be in conflict with anything. Do not be in conflict with anyone or anything. When you’re not in conflict with anything, the mind begins to surrender itself… This is the easiest thing that you ever had to do. It’s simplicity itself. It’s simplicity itself because there’s nothing you have to do. There’s nothing you have to become. There’s no one you have to change.”
“What you call your life will take care of itself. It knows what to do better than you do. We're very limited in our understanding about the body, or the affairs of the body, what's going on in the body. Do not try to do anything with your body. Your body will do whatever it came here to do. It knows what to do.”
“We believe through many incarnations that we are the image, we are a person, and there are others, and there are external things to contend with in this world. But I say to you these things are false.”
“Stop thinking about yourself so much. About getting a new job, losing a job, about working or not working. No one is ever happy. Those people who work are miserable because they have to work. Those people who don't work are miserable because they can't find a job. And when they find a job they join the miserable ones who can't stand the job. Where is peace? Peace is your real nature. It's within you. It is you. Look for it and you'll find it. Seek and ye shall find.”
“If this appears to be complicated, all you've got to do is give it all up. Say, "Take it God. It's all yours." And let go so completely, there's no room for a question. You say, "Take this, God. Take the whole burden. I no longer care." But it is difficult also because it means you have to give everything to God and not worry about a thing. Do not concern yourself with anything in this world; realize God is taking care if it. That's true surrender.”
Shargrol
“Sit, notice where things seem to get hung up, and gently and curiously investigate.”
"I think it's all about _subtlety_. Really seeing the slightest preferences, the slightest ambition, the slightest avoidance, the slightest ignoring. The trick to doing this is to use _less_ effort. Much less effort, even no effort. So this is where getting clear about intention is important, because you basically intend to see what you think you need to see, but then let the mind do it."
"Perhaps the most important thing I realized (at this stage in practice) is you don’t control mindfulness. The mind is teaching itself to be mindful. You let it focus on the meditation object, you let it drift, you let it come back. You don’t need to do anything. The mind does everything."
“I had the same doubts about this kind of practice. It's sort of too good to be true: you mean I can just follow where attention goes and that's real practice? In fact, I was on retreat the first time the profundity of this kind of practice struck me. For some reason, despite hearing this idea a few times already, when the teachers at IMS talked about it -- I finally got it. But I doubted it… I even scheduled a talk with a teacher and specifically asked "could this practice actually be productive for me?”
“Ultimately, meditation will point out our very very very basic sense of ‘woundedness and lack’ and shine a big spotlight on it. It will never heal that wound or fill that lack, but rather point out how we were confused in the first place about being wounded and lacking. It's a very strange process to describe, but by going deep into how we relate to the world as self and object, interior and exterior, we eventually see that there is a very basic coping mechanism of trying to put the world "over there" so it can't really hurt us, and me ‘over here’ so I'm in control. The end result is the boundaries become much more porous and flip-floppy and there is a greater clarity and intimacy with what is experienced. It is a bit like waking up from a dream, waking up to the obvious.”
“The flatness is obviously a state. What _you_ are obviously not a state. So why do you fall into an assumption that you are flatness? Chance are it confirms some limited view of yourself. What is that limited view?”
“A good walking around/sitting non-practice practice: ask "Resistance?" like dropping a stone in a mine shaft and quietly listening for how the body/mind responds (or not) to the question.”
“If I wasn't superior or inferior, what would I be? ....oh!”
“The inability to pin things down isn't the fault of the meditator, it's the actual nature of the mind, it's the so-called emptiness. So use home practice to be curious about the vivid-yet-empty display of the mind.”
“That's why those dukka-ish "no clarity" sits are really important. Awareness is still there even though there is apparently no attention. We "know" there is no clarity, awareness knows there is no attention. This is perhaps most spooky of all, because we personally identify with clear-knowing and feel that "I" am lost when there is no clarity. Very interesting, what is making this assessment? I am lost. What is I and what is lost? Where is the problem I think I'm having?”
“Restlessness is ‘the water.’”
“You can fight with the mind, but you'll always lose.”
“So all the practice methods are there to create a container for "letting things be as they are" -- which really doesn't involve doing anything, but it's something humans have a hard time allowing unless they practice.”
“Ironically, when we are skeptical of worries and accepting of ourself, that is often what allows for clear seeing and insight and becoming a slightly less flawed human. Meditation is very sneaky like that. It can't be forced but it does actually deliver as promised.”
“We learn to love our imperfect mind as it is... and ironically when we do that, it automatically becomes a little more perfect. Strange, but it seems to be how it works.”
“It's not really hard practice, but it's long practice. Long and easy is the way to go.”
“Isn't it interesting how the mind keeps throwing stuff in the way, almost as a test? But you can see that the "problem" of dullness isn't dullness, it's how we initially react to it. And over time, learning to maintain "awareness" even as "attention" becomes dull gives you a whole bunch of new skills and maturity that wouldn't happen any other way. This is basically training for all four paths. The knowing of experience ultimately doesn't depend on what is is being experienced.”
“The family dynamic is in some ways as hard as the deaths themselves. Everyone is very sensitive and everyone wants to solve the problem their way, so lots of opportunity for conflict. I can't tell you how many times I said "I really don't know what the answer here is, but right now I'm thinking..." or "Right now I'm feeling X emotion or Y concern." I really tried to own my thoughts and feelings as my own and communicate them that way too. People really respond negatively if you are perceived as forcing your ideas/solutions, or putting your emotional or intellectual worries on them.”
“it’s really important to sense how good intention seems very important, but that the specific results are never up to you”
“For what it's worth, one meditation friend's core wound/need was needing to be safe. At this time they realized that you could be safer in reality by feeling unsafe in reality -- and the whole quest for "Ultimate Mastery!!" of safety through his practice fell away.”
"The last little self contraction due to ignorance/not-understanding the nature of desire... and pure 'seeking' is basically the purest, most distilled version of desire, a kind of desire-without-object…"
Suzanne Chang
“The sense of me is the sense of 'No! Not this. Something's missing. Something's wrong.’”
“The ‘me’ is inherently insecure.”
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
“You let go of the grosser forms of happiness, the grosser strategies for happiness, and get used to more and more refined ones. And they finally take you to the point where there's no course left but to let go of strategies. All strategies… This is the way to true happiness” - Thanissaro
