Quotes About Buddhist Life

#1. It is not appropriate to ask a Buddhist, "What is the purpose of life?" because the question suggests that somewhere out there, perhaps in a cave or on a mountaintop, an ultimate purpose exists. The

Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

#2. I am a reformed Taoist, part-time Buddhist, Hindu, animist, pagan, Jewish mystic, and Christian. I always got along great with priests and rabbis and mullahs and gurus, even though I spend most of my life constructively criticizing them.

Steven Van Zandt

#3. From a Buddhist point of view, emotions are not real. As an actor, I manufacture emotions. They're a sense of play. But real life is the same. We're just not aware of it.

Richard Gere

#4. Steve sighed, wishing for a cigarette. "The Buddha teaches respect for all life." "Oh." She considered this. "Are you a Buddhist?" "No. I'm an asshole. But I keep trying.

Scott Hawkins

#5. Though you recite much scripture,
If you are unaware and do not act according
You are like a cowherd counting others' cattle,
Not a sharer in the wanderer's life.

Anonymous

#6. I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of 'escape of energy,' that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

#7. He led quite a great life, ... He was an Old Testament figure railing against the establishment - a Jewish guy from New York who became a Buddhist, a poet, a musician.

Tom Hayden

#8. According to the Buddhist belief, you can go on and on indefinitely, so you see your life as just a brief moment in time.

Pema Chodron

#9. Our lives are the best school in the universe because we all have to face happiness and madness

Dalin Shu

#10. One of the books that has guided me in the last ten years of my life to help me to be that leader is the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace. He's a Vietnamese monk. He was nominated for a Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King.

Sandra Cisneros

#11. Perhaps you're not the next Buddha. Perhaps you're not the Maitreya. Perhaps that's not your job in this incarnation. Perhaps you have to enjoy life and learn about life through whatever way that you find yourself going.

Frederick Lenz

#12. 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

#13. When she was younger, my mother was quite committed to Roman Catholicism. But she got disillusioned with it and moved closer to something like Buddhist beliefs near the end of her life.

Ralph Fiennes

#14. According to Buddhist scriptures, compassion is the "quivering of the pure heart" when we have allowed ourselves to be touched by the pain of life.

Jack Kornfield

#15. 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

#16. Do not feel that you are destined not to make that final liberation in this life. This is egotism in a reverse form. Don't be concerned one way or the other.

Frederick Lenz

#17. Career success means making enough money to lead the kind of life you would like to lead as a practicing Buddhist.

Frederick Lenz

#18. Even if a fool lived with a wise man all his life, he would still not recognise the truth, like a wooden spoon cannot recognise the flavour of the soup.

Gautama Buddha

#19. If a man lives a pure life, nothing can destroy him.

Gautama Buddha

#20. Much of traditional Buddhist practice is directed toward the ability to see life accurately, beyond all the expectations, projections, and distortions that we typically bring to it.

Dalai Lama XIV

#21. Your body is precious. It is our vehicle for awakening. Treat it with care.

Gautama Buddha

#22. The Buddhists believe that everything in life is random. There are patterns that are intrinsic to life. We don't know why, we just know they're there like the DNA. We have no idea.

Frederick Lenz

#23. People over-focus on teachers as an excuse to avoid their own life, and that way they fail to take responsibility for themselves. They have this feeling that the teacher will just take care of them.

Frederick Lenz

#24. Self discovery doesn't not seek to bring you answers about your personal life or philosophically comfort you about life and death. What it does is bring you into reality as perception itself.

Frederick Lenz

#25. No one can escape death and unhappiness. If people expect only happiness in life, they will be disappointed.

Gautama Buddha

#26. There is no such thing as spiritual achievement; it is simply an awareness intrinsic to all of life.

Frederick Lenz

#27. Buddhists don't feel that enlightenment is particularly unusual. We feel that it's the natural state. Enlightenment simply means perceiving life directly as it is in all of its infinite, ever changing wonder, in all of its varied, myriad states of mind or as pari-nirvana, or whatever.

Frederick Lenz

#28. According to Buddhist practice, there are three stages or steps. The initial stage is to reduce attachment towards life. The second stage is the elimination of desire and attachment to this samsara. Then in the third stage, self-cherishing is eliminated

Dalai Lama

#29. Let a man avoid evil deeds as a man who loves life avoids poison.

Gautama Buddha

#30. I certainly haven't lived the life of a Buddhist monk.

Burton Cummings

#31. Life is dear to all beings, they have the right to live the same that we do.

Gautama Buddha

#32. But while you were looking out the window, you missed the chance to explore the equally interesting Buddhist belief in being present for every facet of your daily life, of being truly present. Be present in this class. And then, when it's over, be present out there, he said,

John Green

#33. One of the things that kills Buddhist spiritual life is excessive seriousness.

Gil Fronsdal

#34. Simplify your life and your mind. Think more of infinity and less of yourself.

Frederick Lenz

#35. Our spirit grows and develops traits in each incarnation that it passes through, and then collects and carries the essence of those traits into future lifetimes. In Buddhist Yoga we refer to our multi-life karmic traits as samskaras.

Frederick Lenz

#36. I'm a Buddhist. You might have a Christian obligation to catch pneumonia while you sit for two and a half hours listening to some twerp in a dress drone on about the virtue of wedded life but, dear as you are to me, I don't.

Natasha Pulley

#37. Originally, I was interested in athletic pursuits like snowboarding, martial arts and surfing. When I went to the Himalayas and met a number of Buddhist monks I was introduced to a new way of looking at life.

Frederick Lenz

#38. The Buddhist message is a message not of the negation of life, but one of affirmation.

Frederick Lenz

#39. In every religion I can think of, there exists some variation on the theme of abandoning the settled life and walking one's way to godliness. The Hindu sadhu, the pilgrims of Compostela walking past their sins, the circumambulators of the Buddhist kora, the haj.

Robyn Davidson

#40. As a Buddhist, I see no distinction between religious practice and daily life. Religious practice is a twenty-four hour occupation.

Dalai Lama XIV

#41. Don't use Buddhism to become a Buddhist. Use Buddhism to become better at whatever else in your life you are doing already.

Dalai Lama

#42. Much though he recites the sacred texts, but acts not accordingly, that heedless man is like a cowherd who only counts the cows of others - he does not partake of the blessings of the holy life.

Gautama Buddha

#43. Buddhist monk Sogyal Rinpoche put it this way: "Perhaps it is only those who understand just how fragile life is who know how precious it is.

Lionel Fisher

#44. Well, I'm Buddhist, Ray, and so part of my Buddhism has allowed me to look a little more deeply at people and the events in my life that created me. And I think a lot of that Buddhism comes out in the world view in this novel.

Sandra Cisneros

#45. Farmed animals are not future Buddhas donating their flesh out of compassion for those of us who have developed a craving for it. They are victims of our greed from whom we steal the most precious gift any of us has: life.

Norm Phelps

#46. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be in a group, or I wanted to work for Greenpeace, or I wanted to be a Buddhist monk. Those were the only three things I really wanted to do. I was doing some sort of soul searching in life.

Dave Wakeling

#47. [I'm concerned with] aesthetics and this idea of how the passage between life and death goes. I can visually present that by borrowing this Buddhist statue.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

#48. The motivation of all religious practice is similar: love, sincerity, honesty. The way of life of practically all religious persons is consistent. The teachings of tolerance, love, and compassion are the same.

Dalai Lama

#49. Here's my personal definition of a Buddhist: someone who prioritizes cultivating her relationship to her own heartmind - and her relationship to other sentient beings - above whatever else she might achieve in life.

Ethan Nichtern

#50. From the Buddhist point of view, it is true that emptiness is a characteristic of all of life - if we look carefully at any experience we will find transparency, insubstantiality, with no solid, unchanging core to our experience. But that does not mean that nothing matters.

Sharon Salzberg

#51. Whether you believe in God or not does not matter much, whether you believe in Buddha or not does not matter so much; as a Buddhist, whether you believe in reincarnation or not does not matter so much. You must lead a good life.

Dalai Lama XIV

#52. The Buddhists think that, because we've all had infinite previous lives, we've all been each other's relatives. Therefore all of you, in the Buddhist view, in some previous life ... have been my mother - for which I do apologize for the trouble I caused you.

Robert Thurman

#53. The point of the spiritual revolution is not to become a good Buddhist, but to become a wise and compassionate human being, to awaken from our life of complacency and ignorance and to be a buddha.

Noah Levine

#54. What matters is that you meditate, you're seeking enlightenment, you're on the pathway to enlightenment, and you're having fun. Don't look for reassurance in the eyes of others. Look for reassurance in your own eyes. Only you know if Buddhist practice is improving the quality of your life.

Frederick Lenz

#55. The essence of all practice is to be cool. Life is not worth getting excited about because whatever you perceive is an illusion.

Frederick Lenz

#56. I was exposed to a mix of cultures, lots of different religions and beliefs. I was a spiritual kid and went to Indian powwows and Buddhist temples. But over a period of time, with reading and thinking, I started to feel it was all so absurd: The whole idea of life after death is ridiculous.

Harvey Fierstein

#57. One act of pure love in saving life is greater than spending the whole of one's time in religious offerings to the gods ...

Gautama Buddha

#58. I've had loss in my life, and I like to think my mother's energy lives on in some faintly Buddhist way. I do find some comfort there.

Damian Lewis

#59. The Buddhist mindset seeks to eliminate the self. That is to say, what we want to experience is life, not self. When there's less self and more life, we're very content, and when there's more self and less life we're quite unhappy.

Frederick Lenz

#60. I think my Buddhist practice has a profound influence on my life and encompasses my creative projects.

Duncan Sheik

#61. Shambhala does have unique teachings, as do many Buddhist traditions. For example, certain teachings within Shambhala have to do with raising the personal windhorse, or the energy of the individual, so a person has good fortitude to be able to live a good life.

Sakyong Mipham

#62. 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

#63. In the world of Buddhist mind, in the advanced states, we go beyond time, space, life, death and Newsweek.

Frederick Lenz

#64. If you want to experience the unalloyed ecstasy of life, you can accomplish this through the twin Buddhist practices of meditation and mindfulness.

Frederick Lenz

#65. I think that whatever we encounter in life, we want to encourage a balance between the mind and the soul ... and that is to consider about 50% data from the mind and 50% data from the soul. This is what Buddhists call, "the middle way."

Neale Donald Walsch

#66. Let your love flow outward through the universe, To its height, its depth, its broad extent, A limitless love, without hatred or enmity. Then as you stand or walk, Sit or lie down, As long as you are awake, Strive for this with a one-pointed mind; Your life will bring heaven to earth.

Gautama Buddha

#67. Mary, my little girl, was confirmed in a Buddhist temple. She saw the Life write up on Buddhism, with pictures of the ceremony, and she said she wanted to be confirmed there because she only liked Jesus as a kid. She was a little disappointed in him when he grew up.

Kenneth Rexroth

#68. All beings tremble before violence. All love life. All fear death. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?

Gautama Buddha

#69. Life is so very difficult. How can we be anything but kind.

Gautama Buddha

#70. Neither my life of luxury in the palace -nor- my life as ascetic in the forest were ways to enlightenment.

Gautama Buddha

#71. 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

#72. By changing our inner state of mind, we can change any suffering or hardship into a source of joy, regarding it as a means for forging and developing our lives. To turn even sorrow into a source of creativity - this is the way of life of a Buddhist

Daisaku Ikeda

#73. If there is no other world and there is no fruit and ripening of actions well done or ill done, then here and now in this life I shall be free from hostility, affliction, and anxiety, and I shall live happily.

Gautama Buddha

#74. Get your emotions under control and your life under control. Work really hard and don't make a big deal out of yourself. Have humility. Believe in yourself. Don't get a fanatical fixation on a teacher.

Frederick Lenz

#75. Half the spiritual life consists of remembering what we are up against and where we are going.

Ayya Khema

#76. Meditation helps me feel the shape, the texture of my inner life. Here, in the quiet, I can begin to taste what Buddhists would call my true nature, what Jews call the still, small voice, what Christians call the holy spirit.

Wayne Muller

#77. My whole life, I never spoke a single-word.

Gautama Buddha

#78. When I was a young man, near the beginning of my life, I looked around with true mindfulness and saw that all things are subject to decay.

Gautama Buddha

#79. According to Zen Buddhist cosmology there are ten thousand different states of mind to view and understand life through.

Frederick Lenz

#80. To be honest, I'm trying to maintain a Buddhist detachment about the whole thing to stop it taking ten years off my life.

Mark Haddon

#81. An enlightened teacher simply expresses enlightenment in their life by living. It is the student's job to gain the teachings. The teacher's job is just to be perfectly enlightened.

Frederick Lenz

#82. I myself feel, and also tell other Buddhists that the question of Nirvana will come later. There is not much hurry. If in day to day life you lead a good life, honesty, with love, with compassion, with less selfishness, then automatically it will lead to Nirvana.

Dalai Lama

#83. True wisdom is being able to say 'it is what it is' with a smile of celebratory wonder on your face.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

#84. "The world is afflicted with death and decay, therefore the wise do not grieve, knowing the terms of the world," says an old Buddhist teaching. In other words: Get used to it.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#85. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.

Dalai Lama

#86. The Christian pities men because they are dying, and the Buddhist pities them because they are living. The Christian is sorry for what damages the life of a man; but the Buddhist is sorry for him because he is alive.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#87. 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

#88. The beauty of life is, while we cannot undo what is done, we can see it, understand it, learn from it and change. So that every new moment is spent not in regret, guilt, fear or anger, but in wisdom, understanding and love.

Jennifer Edwards

#89. We must control the tendencies within our being that are destructive, when we want to slam somebody else, hurt them, injure them, or push them out of the way. A reverence for life needs to be developed, in which all things are sacred.

Frederick Lenz

#90. Here in this body are the sacred rivers, here are the sun and moon, as well as the pilgrimage places. I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body

Saraha

#91. One thing that these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.

Terence McKenna

#92. Cause and effect, in the Buddhist sense, though. Any action you undertake creates a seed that will sprout when the conditions are right, creating a good or bad result."
"Do you believe in it?"
He doesn't allow even a pause. "Very much so.

Jacquie Underdown

#93. Human beings have become so afraid of the unknown, themselves, and each other that they deprive themselves of that innate ecstasy and love of life which comes with a human body, mind and spirit, by hiding behind the empty shell of their ego.

Frederick Lenz

#94. Those who see worldly life as an obstacle to Dharma see no Dharma in everyday actions. They have not yet discovered that there are no everyday actions outside of Dharma.

Dogen

#95. Do not feel that you are destined to enlightenment in this life. You have no idea. This is an illusion of selfhood. It's gross ignorance and egotism.

Frederick Lenz

#96. Well I travelled quite a lot in the east, and one of the things that impressed me greatly was the buddhist notion of the continuity of things, the wheel of life which is what we're talking about, the ever turning wheel.

Morris West

#97. Though through all his life a fool associates with a wise man, he yet understands not the Dharma, as the spoon, the flavor of soup.

Gautama Buddha

#98. They had an old-fashioned sincerity ... that touched Archy in this time when everything good in life was either synthesised in transgenic cyborg vats or shade-grown in small batches by a Buddhist collective of blind ex-Carmelite Wiccans.

Michael Chabon

#99. Art as the single superior counter-force against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, anti-Nihilist par excellence.

Friedrich Nietzsche