Quotes About Mindfulness

21 quotes

Jon Kabat-Zinn described mindfulness as a way of befriending ourselves and our experience. Peter Matthiessen said the purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment but to pay attention, even at unextraordinary times. Louis L'Amour observed how rarely we manage it: few of us ever live in the present, forever anticipating what is to come or remembering what has gone.

Mary Oliver called it a negligence of the mind not to notice a heron coming to the pond at dusk. Robert M. Pirsig noticed that the more you look, the more you see. Carl Jung warned that one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Richard Bach offered the simplest method for clearing a cloud from your life: relax and remove it from your thinking. Eric Schmidt named the opposite danger bluntly: a mind set in its ways is wasted.
Iranian poet

Let go of your mind and then be mindful. Close your ears and listen!

— Love's Ripening: Rumi on the Heart's Journey

16th Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 and Stoic philosopher

Do every act of your life as though it were the very last act of your life.

— Meditations

English writer

It is good to stop by the track for a space, put aside the knapsack, wipe the brows, and talk a little of the upper slopes of the mountain we think we are climbing, would but the trees let us see it.

— A Modern Utopia

Nobel Prize winning German-Swiss poet, novelist and painter

Within yourself is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.

Florentine poet, writer, and philosopher

The mind which is created quick to love, is responsive to everything that is pleasing, soon as by pleasure it is awakened into activity. Your apprehensive faculty draws an impression from a real object, and unfolds it within you, so that it makes the mind turn thereto. And if, being turned, it inclines towards it, that inclination is love; that is nature, which through pleasure is bound anew within you.

— The Divine Comedy

English modernist writer

The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don't belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.

— A Writer's Diary

English playwright and poet

My brain I'll prove the female to my soul; my soul the father: and these two beget a generation of still-breeding thoughts, and these same thoughts people this little world.

— Richard II

Author, novelist, writer

An interval of meditation, serious and grateful, was the best corrective of everything dangerous.

— Persuasion

French novelist, critic and essayist

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

— Time Regained

American author and journalist

you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.

— The Sun Also Rises

Colombian writer and Nobel laureate

I don't have to say so because people can see it from leagues away. I am ugly, shy and anachronistic, but by dint of not wanting to be those things I have pretended to be just the opposite.

— Memories of My Melancholy Whores

French writer and aviator

He is not admiring the colours of the earth and sky, the marks of the wind on the sea, the gilded clouds of twilight; they are the objects of his meditation.

— Wind, Sand and Stars

French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher

All things can be deadly to us, even the things made to serve us; as in nature walls can kill us, and stairs can kill us, if we do not walk circumspectly.

— Pensées

German priest and theologian

Rather than walk about holy places we can thus pause in our thoughts, examine our heart, and visit the wheel promised land.

— Luther's Works, Volume 54: Table Talk

Indian philosopher and the founder of Buddhism

Meditate, Ānanda, do not delay, or else you will regret it later. This is our instruction to you.

— The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya

16th Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 and Stoic philosopher

How good it is, when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this the dead body of a bird or pig.

— Meditations

Nobel Prize winning German-Swiss poet, novelist and painter

Possibly the apparent relapse they had suffered was not a fall and a cause for suffering, but a leap forward and a positive act.

— The Glass Bead Game