1,972 Quotes About Buddhism

Suppose a Sun many times brighter than our Sun comes up in the sky. After we get used to its light, it goes away. Then our Sun will feel like moon to us and what we call as “light” will seem like darkness. So light and darkness are relative terms. Darkness is just less light.

Your questions are useless if your mind makes them as easily as a bubble-blower makes bubbles. A question should burn like fire. It should take you to a journey.

With some gratitude, I realized that my awareness was now stronger than my neurosis. This did not mean that things would never go to pieces, only that I did not have to fall apart when they did. In fact, my own ability to go to pieces was protecting me in this situation. I did not have to let my identity as an efficient and together person imprison me.

One way to think of this dignity is to equate when you are on the path with unraveling a ball of yarn. You have wound your sense of self so tightly that it's hard to be anything other than you, a big ball of yarn. That's just who you are, not string, or threads, but a ball of yarn.

According to the Buddha's doctrine that they believed in, it was not the caste that defined a person high or low. It was one's deeds that mattered.

It's hard to know whether to laugh or to cry at the human predicament. Here we are with so much wisdom and tenderness, and—without even knowing it—we cover it over to protect ourselves from insecurity. Although we have the potential to experience the freedom of a butterfly, we mysteriously prefer the small and fearful cocoon of ego.

Siddhartha considered the ways of the demon, and in that moment he struck.

Before enlightenment, cornflakes and coffee. After enlightenment, cornflakes and coffee.

This constant mental diatribe and the frustrations, worries, insecurities and muscular tension that ensues are the self.