Quotes About Buddhism

#1. Note the similarities with buddhism
a buddhist who has achieved nirvana is not sad
primarily because it does not know the concept
of sad [ ... ]

Tao Lin

#2. Celibacy doesn't make you enlightened, otherwise every nun or priest in Buddhism or Christianity would be enlightened. People who don't date and can't get any action would be enlightened.

Frederick Lenz

#3. I believe in Buddhism. Not every aspect, but most of it. So I take bits and pieces.

Tiger Woods

#4. Soccer isn't the same as Bach or Buddhism. But it is often more deeply felt than religion, and just as much a part of the community's fabric, a repository of traditions.

Franklin Foer

#5. The essential premise of Buddhism is that there is enlightenment, there is nirvana. Beyond this world, beyond all worlds, there's something radiant, perfect and eternal.

Frederick Lenz

#6. Many spiritual teachers - in Buddhism, in Islam - have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.

Bell Hooks

#7. Everything comes from your heart-Buddhism

Rich Leyden

#8. I think when religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism - as well as Christianity and Judaism - were founded, at that time societies were generally male-dominated. So, therefore this social notion also influenced religion.

Dalai Lama

#9. I was studying Tibetan Buddhism when I was quite young, again influenced by Kerouac.

David Bowie

#10. Buddhism leads you to the awareness that all things are holy. Everything is holy. The dark has its own light, in other words.

Frederick Lenz

#11. As Buddhism moved from one culture to another, it always adapted.

Pema Chodron

#12. In Buddhism, there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water and when you're tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.

Bruce Lee

#13. I think what's important and extraordinarily practical about Buddhism, is that it offers very concrete methods for people to work with.

Pankaj Mishra

#14. I often wonder when I make a film - I'm thinking of making a film of the Buddha - and I often wonder: If Buddha had all the elements that are given to a director - if he had music, if he had visuals, if he had a video camera - would we get Buddhism better?

Shekhar Kapur

#15. Whether you look at Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, wherever a distinction of sex is made, it is to the advantage of men. If you think of religions as if they were novels, the authors are men, and so are the major characters ...

Katha Pollitt

#16. Buddhism, he thought, is a clean religion. You never heard about how eight people - two of them children - just got blown the fuck up as part of the long-standing conflict between Buddhists and whoever.

Scott Hawkins

#17. The thing about Buddhism is that it stresses attainment of something ineffable, that is where it differs from other religions in that it's more correct. We live in a world with promises of paradise.

Frederick Lenz

#18. Happiness will come through the practice of yoga and Buddhism, that happiness is not something you will lose at the end of this lifetime. It will stay with you.

Frederick Lenz

#19. I've tried a number of religions and gurus in my time, including Buddhism, but ultimately they didn't do as much for my peace of mind as snooker.

Ronnie O'Sullivan

#20. Buddhism: a violent religion that has compensated for the exploding human population by causing whole species of animal vessels to go extinct.

Bauvard

#21. Buddhism asks big questions about birth and death, cause and effect, emptiness and form, delusion and enlightenment. I just hope you're not actually thinking about any of that stuff, because Buddhism is fundamentally about something that requires no thought.

Karen Maezen Miller

#22. In Buddhism, they say attachment to anything only leads to suffering. So when we laugh, it's our way of saying, 'I'm unattached to that.' You're tickled by it, it makes your lobes do something on their own. So humor is very important to me. I always take that to the stage first.

Jason Mraz

#23. What is science but the pursuit of the truth? What is Buddhism but 2500 years of observation as to the nature of mind?

Wade Davis

#24. When you practice Buddhism, you have to always self-reflect, and you can't avoid your problems. That makes me understand human beings better. I feel that the more I do that in my own life, the more I can see how to play a character.

Vinessa Shaw

#25. Love requires learning to love ourselves in the mirror, and learning to look other people in the eye. Buddhism, in turn, asks us to pause and look at even the subtlest causal connections and take our appreciation of them to greater depths.

Ethan Nichtern

#26. Buddhism helps people to overcome pain. The deepest pain that Chinese people feel now is the pain of separation from loved ones, one of the eight pains in Buddhism.

Ye Xiaowen

#27. In Zen Buddhism an action is considered good when it brings happiness and well-being to oneself and others, evil when it brings suffering and harm to oneself and others.

Thich Thien-An

#28. Think about it for a second:
Babies are not born prejudice, they are not racist,they don't hate, they don't judge, and are not born believing in christianity, buddhism, sikhism, hinduism, judaism or any other ism.
We, as adults, teach them all these things.

Steven Aitchison

#29. My work has been in the field of engaged Buddhism. That is my own practice, which began in 1965 that formed the base for the work I was doing in the civil rights and anti-war movement.

Joan Halifax

#30. Attachment has to do with suffering, so it's really close to Buddhism, because Buddhism wants to relieve you from suffering; you're supposed to escape from suffering.

Gerald Stern

#31. 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

#32. It's very difficult to stay angry when a room full of bald guys in orange robes start giggling. Buddhism.

Christopher Moore

#33. I don't feel any great need to subscribe to a certain notion of Buddhism that says "You have to do this" or "You have to do that." Buddhism does not prescribe rituals or prohibitions in the way many religions do.

Pankaj Mishra

#34. Buddhism is in your heart. Even if you don't have any temple or any monks, you can still be a Buddhist in your heart and life.

Nhat Hanh

#35. For modern science, at least from a philosophical point of view, the critical divide seems to be between inanimate matter and the origin of living organisms, while for Buddhism the critical divide is between non-sentient matter and the emergence of sentient beings.

Dalai Lama XIV

#36. Ultimately, I hope Jesus will save Buddhism, Islam and every other religion, including the Christian religion, which often seems to need saving about as much as any other religion does.

Brian D. McLaren

#37. In 1995, the Chinese government picked a 6-year-old child to succeed the Panchen Lama, the second highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism.

Barbara Demick

#38. Near Tokyo lived a great Samurai warrior, now old, who decided to teach Zen Buddhism to young people. In spite of his age, the legend was that he could defeat any adversary.

Paulo Coelho

#39. Buddhism is simply a methodology, a way of becoming one with the part of ourselves that is happy.

Frederick Lenz

#40. There are things that I value now that I didn't when I first went over there, like Zen Buddhism, which has become part of my life over the last couple years.

Matthew Sweet

#41. This concept that you refer to in Buddhism is something I've been nurtured with through the history of my country for 700, 800 years - Persian poets and philosophers haven't said anything different with regard to experiencing life in the moment, as opposed to the belief of permanence.

Abbas Kiarostami

#42. I try to make sure that the Buddhism is more or less implicit in the music rather than explicit.

Duncan Sheik

#43. The first precept in Buddhism is "Do not kill." This precept is not merely a legalistic prohibition, but a realization of our affinity with all who share the gift of life. A compassionate heart provides a firm ground for this precept.

Dhammananda Bhikkhuni

#44. Buddhism has become a socially recognized religious philosophy for Americans, whereas it used to be considered an exotic religion.

Thurston Moore

#45. Buddhism is not just going to temple, being at a ceremony and dressing up. That is the church of Buddhism. Esoteric Buddhism is to move beyond this world.

Frederick Lenz

#46. If ideas and beliefs are to be denied validity outside the geographical and cultural bounds of their origin, Buddhism would be confined to north India, Christianity to a narrow tract in the Middle East and Islam to Arabia.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#47. In Buddhism we meditate. We make our minds quiet by learning to focus on the chakras, release internal energy that we call kundalini, and bring ourselves into high states of consciousness.

Frederick Lenz

#48. I'd gotten away from my Buddhism. And I quit meditating.

Tiger Woods

#49. I was raised Catholic, but then I discovered Buddhism, and I used to have a boyfriend who was a Scientologist, and they are all good religions that help people. As far as I'm concerned, you can have all three religions at once and it's okay!

Penelope Cruz

#50. There is no reason whatsoever to think that Buddhism can compete successfully with the relentless evangelizing of Christianity and Islam. Nor should it try to.

Sam Harris

#51. Buddhism suggests there are no elect. Everything rests upon your own self-effort, which is the good news because that means you don't have to wait around for some nebulous God to help you.

Frederick Lenz

#52. I do regard Islam to be a religion of peace in the same sense as Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism are.

Mahatma Gandhi

#53. The principles of Buddhism have become more commonplace, which is a good thing.

Sakyong Mipham

#54. Buddhism is a practice in which we learn to avoid injuring others, and ourselves. It's a practice in which we learn to respond to beauty, and to respond to difficult circumstances with patience, with a sense of calm, with clarity.

Frederick Lenz

#55. Buddhism is a path of supreme optimism, for one of its basic tenets is that no human life or experience is to be wasted or forgotten, but all should be transformed into a source of wisdom and compassionate living.

Taitetsu Unno

#56. Today we can see many different forms of Buddhism, such as Zen and Theravada Buddhism. All these different aspects are practices of Buddha's teachings, and all are equally precious; they are just different presentations.

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso

#57. George used to say that Granny wasn't a time-optimist, she was a time-atheist, and the only religion she believed in was Do-It-Later-Buddhism.

Fredrik Backman

#58. I see no contradiction between Buddhism and Christianity ... I intend to become as good a Buddhist as I can.

Thomas Merton

#59. In Buddhism what we seek to do is change ourselves into someone who's beautiful to be.

Frederick Lenz

#60. So my unsolicited advise to women in the workplace is this: when faced with sexism or agism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: "Is this person in between me and what I want to do?" If the answer is no, ignore it and move on.

Tina Fey

#61. Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.

G.K. Chesterton

#62. The purpose of Buddhism is not to convert people. It is to give them tools so they can create greater happiness. So they can be happier Catholics, happier atheists, happier Buddhists.

David Michie

#63. There isn't really a case for Buddhism. It's a path you can choose to follow. I follow it because of the meditation, but I wouldn't tell anyone else that they should follow it or that it's true in some sense.

Nabeel Qureshi

#64. Buddhism is the study of power initially. It takes a certain amount of power to even know your potential - to have the sense that you can change the way you perceive.

Frederick Lenz

#65. Just studying Buddhism, then meditating and going to Buddhist monasteries, talking to Buddhist monks, combined with the Thai people themselves, changed the way I look at the world.

John Burdett

#66. Buddhism suggests that you have that choice; you are in the driver's seat. Hertz or somebody has put you there. You have an absolute choice about what you experience in your mind.

Frederick Lenz

#67. Two of Epicurus's early influences, Democritus and Pyrrho, had actually journeyed all the way to what is now India, where they had encountered Buddhism in the schools of the gymnosophists

Epicurus

#68. The first principle of Buddhism is 'Suffering exists. How do I escape it?' Buddhism

Yuval Noah Harari

#69. Change is one of the only constants in Buddhism; as meditation became the way I breathed in the days, this became apparent.

Nick Flynn

#70. Buddhism is perception, gaining control of the mind and directing one's attention, to raise the kundalini energy so that it flows with such volatility and force that we simply perceive life correctly.

Frederick Lenz

#71. Buddhism teaches us not to want things, not to avoid things, not to be upset by the loss. In the I Ching, there's a hexagram that says, "Be like the sun at midday". View all things as being equal.

Frederick Lenz

#72. The cool thing is that jazz is really a wonderful example of the great characteristics of Buddhism and great characteristics of the human spirit. Because in jazz we share, we listen to each other, we respect each other, we are creating in the moment. At our best, we're non-judgmental.

Herbie Hancock

#73. Buddhism itself is all about empowering yourself, not about getting what you want.

Pema Chodron

#74. In Buddhism, what is known as beginner's mind is a way to look at the world as if for the first time: with interest, enthusiasm, and engagement. This may be the optimal state of mind for a healthy brain.

Louis Cozolino

#75. I feel a lot more secure about the directions I take, than I might have, had I not practiced Buddhism.

Herbie Hancock

#76. A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.

Alan W. Watts

#77. To me, as a visual artist, I don't want to get into the theory of Buddhism. There are many Buddhism theories and they fight each other, like Christians as well.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

#78. Buddhism has to do with your daily life, with your suffering and with the suffering of the people around you.

Nhat Hanh

#79. Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or "loyal opposition" to the culture in which it is involved.

Alan Watts

#80. There are techniques of Buddhism, such as meditation, that anyone can adopt. And, of course, there are Christian monks and nuns who already use Buddhist methods in order to develop their devotion, compassion, and ability to forgive.

Dalai Lama

#81. Precepts in Buddhism are not imposed by some outside authority. They arise from our own insight based on the practice of mindfulness. To be attached to the form without understanding the essence is to fall into what Buddhism calls attachment to rules.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#82. The most important thing Zen Buddhism teaches us is that we are already originally enlightened. This must never be forgotten.

Clara Taylor

#83. BUDDHISM teaches that nothing is permanent, nothing is fixed, all is in flux.

Peter Popham

#84. I tell my students not to be frightened; in the history of Buddhism-for 2,500 years-no one has broken or fractured a leg because of sitting in meditation.

Guo Jun

#85. I think the reason Buddhism and Western psychology are so compatible is that Western psychology helps to identify the stories and the patterns in our personal lives, but what Buddhist awareness training does is it actually allows the person to develop skills to stay in what's going on.

Tara Brach

#86. The purpose of studying Buddhism is not to study Buddhism, but to study ourselves.

Shunryu Suzuki

#87. Buddhism has turned me on to my humanness, and is challenging my humanness so that I can become more human.

Herbie Hancock

#88. Buddha taught kindness towards lower beings; and since then there has not been a sect in India that has not taught charity to all beings, even to animals. This kindness, this mercy, this charity - greater than any doctrine - are what Buddhism left to us.

Swami Vivekananda

#89. Every one of the "great" belief systems of the world, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Confucianism, insists on women's inferiority as an article of faith. Individual

Rosalind Miles

#90. The first principle of monotheist religions is 'God exists. What does He want from me?' The first principle of Buddhism is 'Suffering exists. How do I escape it?

Yuval Noah Harari

#91. Self-honesty is absolutely necessary in the practice of Buddhism.

Frederick Lenz

#92. In Buddhism you study how to release the kundalini to the levels that would certainly afford career success. If we move it further, into the planes of knowledge and wisdom, it enables the practitioner to do just about anything.

Frederick Lenz

#93. Perhaps Islam is analogous to a carnivorous gene complex, Buddhism to a herbivorous one.

Richard Dawkins

#94. In Buddhism, mindfulness is the key. Mindfulness is the energy that sheds light on all things and all activities, producing the power of concentration, bringing forth deep insight and awakening. Mindfulness is the base of Buddhist practice

Nhat Hanh

#95. In Zen Buddhism it is said that "if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him". Which means that if by walking on the spiritual path you encounter the rigid ideas and fixed laws of institutionalised Buddhism , you must free yourself from them too.

Yuval Noah Harari

#96. I've worked in the prison system, on death row and maximum security. I did that work for six years. I've worked with some of the most difficult people in our society. Buddhism was accessible and helpful for these individuals.

Joan Halifax

#97. I don't want to convert people to Buddhism - all major religions, when understood properly, have the same potential for good.

Dalai Lama

#98. The Dalai Lama once said that 'If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change!' This is a great thought! And great thoughts belong to great men only!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#99. I never stopped studying Buddhism. In the past few years, in between movies, I do a retreat.

Jet Li

#100. Buddhism has had a major effect on who I am and how I think about the world. What I have learned is that I like all religions, but only parts of them.

Uma Thurman