140 Quotes by Eknath Easwaran

A mind that is racing over worries about the future or recycling resentments from the past is ill equipped to handle the challenges of the moment. By slowing down, we can train the mind to focus completely in the present. Then we will find that we can function well whatever the difficulties. That is what it means to be stress-proof: not avoiding stress but being at our best under pressure, calm, cool, and creative in the midst of the storm.

Patience is an unfailing remedy for friction in personal relations. Even if a person has never won a beauty contest, has no money in the bank, can't even change a flat tire, if he or she has inexhaustible patience, then we will find that life with such a person will never grow stale.

When people used to complain to the Buddha that they were upset, telling him, "Our children upset us; our partner agitates us," his simple reply would be, "You are not upset because of your children or your partner; you are upset because you are upsettable.

Two forces pervade human life, the Gita says: the upward thrust of evolution and the downward pull of our evolutionary past.

The law of karma says that no matter what context I find myself in, it is neither my parents, nor my science teacher, nor the mailman, but I alone who have brought myself into this state because of my past actions. Instead of trapping me in a fatalistic snare, this gives me freedom. Because I alone have brought myself into my present condition, I myself, by working hard and striving earnestly, can reach the supreme state which is nirvana.

Why do you want a new truth when you do not practice what you already know?Far better to read a few books and make them your own than to read many books quickly and superficially.

Mysticism is the conviction, born of personal experience, that there is a divine core in human personality which each of us can realize directly, and that making this discovery is the real goal of our lives.

I am time, the destroyer of all; I have come to consume the world.

….You are an exalted creature, with a spark of the divine within you that nothing you do can extinguish; and you have been granted life in order to give, because it is in giving that we receive....