525 Quotes by Sam Harris

The principal enemy of mindfulness – or of any meditative practice – is our deeply conditioned habit of being distracted by thoughts. The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing that we are thinking.

Unreason is now ascendant in the United States – in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government.

The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn’t, we will kill you.

We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain – and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running.

In a world of true abundance you shouldn’t have to work to justify your life.

The question of whether enlightenment is a permanent state need not detain us. The crucial point is that you can glimpse something about the nature of consciousness that will liberate you from suffering in the present.

Long before reaching this kind of stability in meditation, however, one can discover that the sense of self – the sense that there is a thinker behind one’s thoughts, an experiencer amid the flow of experience – is an illusion. The feeling that we call “I” is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking. Consider.

Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.

We must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it.