Top 100 Buddhism's Quotes
#1. At least in popular parlance, what makes religious folks religious today is not so much that they believe in Jesus' divinity or Buddhism's Four Noble Truths but that they hold certain moral positions on bedroom issues such as premarital sex, homosexuality, and abortion.
Stephen Prothero
#2. Buddhism's cardinal ethical principle is to avoid causing harm.
Gil Fronsdal
#3. We live inside our mind. That's all there is. Everything that you experience is not external, it's internal. All your experiences are predicated upon your awareness field.
Frederick Lenz
#4. Part of what we seek in Buddhism is the sense of quiet observation. We don't get so involved in a state of mind that we forget that it's just another transient state of mind, no matter how much ecstasy or agony is involved.
Frederick Lenz
#5. Human beings going to their jobs and living their lives are unconscious. They don't know what's going on. They don't know why you are born or why you die.
Frederick Lenz
#6. It does happen, of course, that the priesthood has been on bad terms with womankind for some three thousand years. You see, Buddhism teaches that women are evil. Fiends. Messengers of hell. I've spent years immersed in the scriptures, so it's no accident that you and I fight all the time.
Eiji Yoshikawa
#7. The human life form vibrates at a certain rate, but all vibratory rates are not suitable for human life. So it's very necessary to meditate on higher octave energy, on the clear light, on joy, on happiness.
Frederick Lenz
#8. To love is to be balanced, to extend one's self beyond the sense of self.
Frederick Lenz
#9. There's a different film being made in every mind. And of course, the star of the film is the mind, the personality, the self.
Frederick Lenz
#10. Buddhism does not accept a theory of God, or a creator. According to Buddhism, one's own actions are the creator, ultimately. Some people say that, from a certain angle, Buddhism is not a religion but rather a science of mind.
Dalai Lama
#11. You must have total and impeccable trust in eternity. Whether you like it or not, eternity's in charge, so you might as well trust. You will feel better.
Frederick Lenz
#12. What's important is to be supportive of all who practice. Anyone on any level, even if they don't call it self-discovery, who is seeking to awaken to their own potentials and possibilities, to the inner freedom, deserves your respect and support.
Frederick Lenz
#13. People love misery, they love to feel sorry for themselves, and they definitely don't want to be enlightened. That's the first thing they tell you at boot camp in the higher worlds.
Frederick Lenz
#14. We are like an atomic structure. We've got a causal body that's linked together.
Frederick Lenz
#15. God does everything perfectly. The world doesn't really need saving; it's exactly the way God wants it to be at the moment.
Frederick Lenz
#16. There's no path to liberation that doesn't pass through the shadow.
Jay Michaelson
#17. Render unto meditation the things that are meditation's, and unto medication the things that are medication's.
Barry Graham
#18. As far as miracles are concerned, I'm not aware that I perform miracles. After many years and lifetimes of meditation, I am able to use the kundalini energy to alter other people's awareness and aid them in their search for light and certainty.
Frederick Lenz
#19. Nothing lasts forever - except forever. That's the good news. It's a good thing that nothing lasts forever because things would get terribly boring.
Frederick Lenz
#20. You are sitting on this little planet, spaceship earth. The universe is very accessible to you. You don't need a spaceship to travel there. Most of the worlds are non-physical. And it's all God; it's all eternity
Frederick Lenz
#21. To increase the flow of kundalini that will alter our perception, it is necessary to clarify the purpose of one's being. This is to come to understand dharma.
Frederick Lenz
#22. Kundalini can be transmitted. A person who is very adept at the enlightenment process can transmit it. Whether you feel it or not, it's affecting you in a very positive way.
Frederick Lenz
#23. Where would I find enough leather
To cover the entire surface of the earth?
But with leather soles beneath my feet,
It's as if the whole world has been covered.
Santideva
#24. Well Buddhism, 'shmoodism', I didn't go to India looking for Buddhism. I was looking for truth, or God, or a better way of life or happiness, fulfillment, meaning, purpose. And a way to become peace in the world and not just fight for peace, as we had in the 60's.
Surya Das
#25. Don Juan speaks of the island of the tonal as something that's in the middle of the ocean ... the nagual.
Frederick Lenz
#26. Each one of you has created a sense of self. That's what the tonal does. Each one of you is taught a system of maintenance that has been developed by humankind from your birth till your death.
Frederick Lenz
#27. Buddhism suits me 'cuz nobody's in charge. Nobody's decidin' for me if I'm good or bad, goin' to heaven or hell. It's just me workin' on my head, you workin' your head, the friggin' Dalai Lama workin' on his head.
Ramez Naam
#28. We have two alternatives: either we question our beliefs - or we don't. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality- or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha's opinion, to train in staying open and curious - to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs - is the best use of our human lives.
Pema Chodron
#29. You need energy and life force to see and feel what you need to do. Otherwise you are in a dark room and you can't tell what's going on. You need to practice meditation.
Frederick Lenz
#30. You exist someplace else, and when you can contact yourself in that other place, when you can open up a kind of inter-dimensional phone line between yourself and our various selves, when you have become aware of that, that's when magic begins.
Frederick Lenz
#31. Siddhartha's priority was to get down to the root of the problem. Buddhism is not culturally bound. Its benefits are not limited to any particular society and have no place in government and politics. Siddhartha
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse
#32. This world is not a middle point in evolution. It's one step down from the middle point in evolution. This is the world of desire and fulfillment, frustration, but at least once in a while you can go to Burger King.
Frederick Lenz
#33. It's necessary to respect all other ways and other teachings on the subject because even though they may not make a lot of sense to us, they might to someone else. Who are we to say?
Frederick Lenz
#34. Reality does appear to exist, there does appear to be birth, youth, people appear to have children. But all of it's a dream. These are isolated moments that are only connected by perception. There is no separation.
Frederick Lenz
#35. Forget that you are anybody and just perform the activities around you. Look at them. Watch what you are doing, my God! Life is right in front of you, and it's great.
Frederick Lenz
#36. What's really great about Buddhism is its rational, informal quality. Coming from my experience of growing up a Catholic, I found Buddhism to be refreshingly easygoing and forgiving.
Matt Dillon
#37. You've gained some powers by your entrance into other dimensions and you use them to attack others or to make others miserable, then power reverses on you and it pulls you apart because it's not supposed to be used that way.
Frederick Lenz
#38. When every aspect of your life is impeccable, then you will find that there's no limit to your journeys into the infinite.
Frederick Lenz
#39. It takes tremendous self-restraint on the part of the student not to want to monopolize the teacher's attention, to live a very controlled life and a happy life, and of course, be dedicated to the cause.
Frederick Lenz
#40. When we are very young children we know how to feel. It's innate. But as we lead a lifetime, we pick up so many thoughts, impressions, feelings, and ideas, that our sensitivity goes away.
Frederick Lenz
#41. You might wish to try Kali's mantra. Kali is another celestial being. She offers very fast spiritual progress through intensity. Her mantra is "Kring!" When you chant Kring, chant it very intensely and sharply. Only chant Kring when you are in a high meditation.
Frederick Lenz
#42. I've never met anyone who's serious about enlightenment.
Frederick Lenz
#43. The study of meditation is the entrance into the world of Wonderland. It has nothing to do with how you'd like it. You want a nice neat little study that's easily understandable.
Frederick Lenz
#44. There's lower mystical kundalini and higher mystical kundalini. There are ranges within the range.
Frederick Lenz
#45. This is a dark age. That's not news. It's a dark time when we have to be particularly aware of danger.
Frederick Lenz
#46. When the time comes for a change, you will find it occurring without having created it yourself. You may think that you are the doer and that you are creating the change. That's nonsense.
Frederick Lenz
#47. It's funny, people who have a lot of sexual energy think of themselves as being not spiritual. They are probably more spiritually inclined. All that sexual energy is kundalini.
Frederick Lenz
#48. First she got Jesus, probably fifteen years ago, and that didn't work out, so she tried Scientology, and that didn't help, but it cost a lot of money, so she tried Buddhism and yoga, and those didn't work, so she started drinking. I think that helped, because she's still drinking.
John Sandford
#49. I think you can't really escape any kind of spiritual education as a child, whether it's New Age or Judaism or Buddhism or whatever it is. You can't escape it, even if you completely disagree with it, you still have it as a foundation that you base things off of.
Jack White
#50. The world is always chaos, but we pretend that it's not because it makes us feel better. In doing so we're able to go through it in a specific manner and form: That's the tonal.
Frederick Lenz
#51. Enlightenment does not mean getting rid of anything. It means changing one's frame of reference so that all things become enlightening.
Mark Epstein
#52. It's necessary for you to work out a way of living that's very strong and very tight and very powerful, otherwise you will not be able to deal with the unknown.
Frederick Lenz
#53. Tantric Zen is for someone who is really broad-minded. It is Bodhidharma's Zen, your Zen, my Zen. Which doesn't mean I have a problem with Japanese Zen. Most Japanese Zen is minding your p's and q's.
Frederick Lenz
#54. As Buddhism moved to the West, one of the big characteristics was the strong place of women. That didn't exist in the countries of origin. It's just a sign of our culture.
Pema Chodron
#55. I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.
C.S. Lewis
#56. Most people don't care much about enlightenment and the truth. They'd rather watch the Home Shopping Network, and maybe that's another kind of truth.
Frederick Lenz
#57. I think that pain gives us appreciation of joy - it's a package deal. And I definitely think that the joys of life far outweigh the pain.
Frederick Lenz
#58. What more could there be, but the absolute beauty of our lives? Look around you, for heaven's sake and stop thinking. It is only in your thoughts and in analytical processes that you lose yourself.
Frederick Lenz
#59. At the last stages of the journey, there's no journey at all.
Jay Michaelson
#60. Knowing life's purpose would invest everything one did with meaning.
Kentetsu Takamori
#61. Eventually you're supposed to get so confounded by this whole thing that you just give up completely, and that's when it starts to work. Not give up the practice, but give up trying to figure it out.
Frederick Lenz
#62. Many men have deep rooted problems regarding the status of women, and during sex these problems come out. They consciously or unconsciously project anger and hate towards women they have sex with. This energy enters a woman's subtle physical body and damages it.
Frederick Lenz
#63. There's really no pain in the realm of the higher astral. A lot of spirits are playing mini-golf having a good time.
Frederick Lenz
#64. You are not what you seem to be. You are one of God's endless dreams in search of wakefulness. Meditation is wakefulness.
Frederick Lenz
#65. As the twelfth-century Tibetian yogi Milarepa said when he heard of his student Gampopa's peak experiences, 'They are neither good nor bad. Keep meditating.'
Pema Chodron
#66. If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it's fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there's an arrow in your heart ...
Pema Chodron
#67. Protection, as we use the word in Buddhism, is actually wisdom, it's insight. Protection is seeing and knowing deeply that all things in our experience arise due to causes, due to conditions coming together in a certain way.
Sharon Salzberg
#68. There's a place where everything comes together and where it's all the same. That state of mind, in which all things are the same, is the state of mind of Tantric Zen.
Frederick Lenz
#69. Scientology, Buddhism, the Kabbalah ... if it makes people's lives better, and easier, then I'll do it. Why not? People scoffed at Christianity 2,000 years ago, didn't they?
Robbie Williams
#70. A Buddhist monk has a responsibility first and foremost to themselves, and that's to find the truth each day in every part of their life.
Frederick Lenz
#71. Man, I'm just into Buddhism, and I'm at peace with the fact that me, as this person, probably gonna not be around. Think about a hermit crab, okay? And it's a shell. It's like, they go from one shell to the next. And that's what I am. I'm just a hermit crab changin' shells.
Danny McBride
#72. I think there's beauty in repetition. And that's part of my culture and African culture as well: repeated things, mantra. It's spiritual, it's meditation, it's Buddhism, it's praying, it's all these things.
Robert Glasper
#73. The highest octave kundalini is the golden light which occurs in the supraconscious; it is the supraconscious. It's what they call Sat Chit Ananda - existence, consciousness, bliss ... full consciousness.
Frederick Lenz
#74. Buddhism has a term for the happiness we feel at someone else's success or good fortune. Sympathetic joy, as it is known, invites us to celebrate for others.
Sharon Salzberg
#75. The mind is like a lake. It reflects eternity when it's very still. If ripples appear, lots of them, then the reflection is not clear. We lose the clarity of the perfect reflection.
Frederick Lenz
#76. Buddhism isn't about temples, and incense, and shaved heads, and robes. It's not about church. There are aspects of Buddhism that involve that. People enjoy that, it helps them, it strengthens their practice.
Frederick Lenz
#77. This is the fourth age, the Kali Yuga, and it's a time of great darkness. At the end of this age, there's supposed to be a cosmic dissolution and then life begins anew. It's a wonderful cycle of rebirth.
Frederick Lenz
#78. Mindfulness is life. Whenever we don't have mindfulness, when we are heedless, it's as if we are dead.
Ajahn Chah
#79. You see, that's the fun of Buddhism. We do have a wild card in the deck that can't be explained, that changes value continuously, and that's enlightenment.
Frederick Lenz
#80. There's a power that brings us to things, and there's a power that lets us move away from things, from people, places, experiences. And what you learn to do in metaphysics is accept.
Frederick Lenz
#81. In the western philosophy you can't perceive infinities at every moment. It's not there to do.
Frederick Lenz
#82. Slow down. Enjoy life. It's tough to slow down if your mind is going a million miles a second. It's tough to slow down if you think what these people do here matters.
Frederick Lenz
#83. You'll find that you will be able to reorder the island of your tonal so that it's in good shape - logical, orderly, neat, and well-defined.
Frederick Lenz
#84. I am very interested in the enlightenment of women. Very few teachers of advanced self discovery work with women, and if they do it's usually in a very second handed way. They treat women as second class citizens.
Frederick Lenz
#85. When you're happy it's pretty tough to knock you over. You can handle whatever comes along in life.
Frederick Lenz
#86. Your tonal must accept that the nagual exists and that it's beneficial and healthy.
Frederick Lenz
#87. Between the creative, open and spontaneous approach to life, and the highly disciplined, pragmatic approach, there's a doorway, if you can find it - and it leads to immortality.
Frederick Lenz
#88. Your mind is your life. It's your essence and your substance. It's the part of you that has always been and will always be. Its formations change constantly, which is what makes you always new.
Frederick Lenz
#89. That's why it's called a practice. We have to practice a practice if it is to be of value.
Allan Lokos
#90. In the chakras, it's the heart chakra, anahata, the central chakra, three above and three below, which symbolizes happiness and love, psychic oneness, spiritual understanding.
Frederick Lenz
#91. Self is the perception of perception. Beyond self there's no perception of perception.
Frederick Lenz
#92. When we sit in meditation, we are closer than usual to the world as it is. By simply bringing body, breath, and mind together in the present moment, we touch Buddha; we touch reality, and we are in the world as it is. Most people's experience in this state is peaceful and rejuvenating.
Andrew Furst
#93. Life isn't complicated. The reason it appears complicated to you is because you are in a very distorted state of mind. That's the basic premise of Buddhism - that you're in a very distorted state of mind.
Frederick Lenz
#94. What is important in self-discovery is the person who keeps going, who has a smile, who is kind to others, who works hard at everything, and who keeps their mind on their own business and not everybody else's.
Frederick Lenz
#95. An imbalanced association is when one or both parties become abusive and takes unfair advantage, tries to block another's enlightenment or success.
Frederick Lenz
#96. Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism , Christianity , and Islam , and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism . For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#97. There's no risk in doing a lousy meditation or not meditating at all. There's no risk in being convenient and comfortable. There's a lot of risk in the world of enlightenment.
Frederick Lenz
#98. There's something uniquely interesting about Buddhism and mathematics, particularly about quantum physics, and where they meet. That has fascinated us for a long time.
Lilly Wachowski
#99. Don't just sit there. Go do something and don't expect that it's going to be fun unless you make it fun. You have got to work on things. That is when you are happy.
Frederick Lenz
#100. The planet earth is a sub-world, way below what's average, because if an enlightened being walked through New York City today, no one would see him or her. They wouldn't see the glow.
Frederick Lenz
