Quotes About Buddhists

#1. People who truly follow the Way would do well to conceal the fact that they are Buddhists.

Dogen

#2. Buddhism cannot be true to itself until Buddhists resolve their ambivalence toward nonhuman animals and extend the full protection of their compassion to the most harmless and helpless of those who live at our mercy in the visible realms.

Norm Phelps

#3. Buddhists make it very simple for you to reach your heavenly reward. To reach Nirvana, all you have to do is live right, think right, and deny yourself just about everything.

Catherine Coulter

#4. You know the Buddhists believe that sometimes when everything is in turmoil, it's because something wonderful is ready to be born and that thing is distracting you so it can have some privacy during the birthing process.

Pearl Cleage

#5. I'm thrilled by the fact that I made something out of nothing. There it is! It wasn't there before: there it is - I made it! That's pretty powerful, and that's the power that Buddhists give to every single person.

Laurie Anderson

#6. What I find is that we're all human beings and that it's all very similar, what we believe. At the bottom, there's really not that much difference between Christians and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists. We all worship God.

Dennis Quaid

#7. Perhaps our matching black outfits - even Phoebe wears dark colors - convince him that we are lesbian Buddhists

Helen Smith

#8. The reason why Broken Men only became Untouchables was because in addition to being Buddhists, they retained their habit of beef-eating, which gave additional ground for offence to the Brahmins to carry their new-found love and reverence to the cow to its logical conclusion.

B.R. Ambedkar

#9. If Palestine had been invaded by Buddhists, or post-Ottoman Turkey, resistance would have been just as strong.

Anonymous

#10. Buddhists were actually the first cognitive-behavioral therapists.

Jack Kornfield

#11. What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can, as the Buddhists say, "respond" rather than simply "react." In

Dan Harris

#12. I do know that some Buddhists are able to attain peace of mind.

Martin Scorsese

#13. 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

#14. We must be able to deal with ridicule and scorn, which it always seems that Buddhists receive. But we feel that it doesn't matter. God's laughing at us; God's laughing at God. We can take a joke too. We're pretty funny.

Frederick Lenz

#15. The Buddhists tell us that in order to find yourself, you first have to lose your mind.

Sally Brampton

#16. Behind the transient reality, there is something else. It is a deeper, more permanent and unchanging reality that we Buddhists call nirvana.

Frederick Lenz

#17. How many Buddhists does it take to change a lightbulb? Many in body, one in mind.

Vinessa Shaw

#18. As [The Nation columnist Katha] Pollitt points out, when one starts looking beneath the surface of things and adding together the out-front atheists with the indifferent nonbelievers, you end up with a much larger group of people than Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Unitarians put together.

Natalie Angier

#19. Buddhists say that a fixed smile, however false, lights up the soul.

Paulo Coelho

#20. We knew what atheists and humanists and Buddhists believed before we actually met any atheists or humanists or Buddhists, and we knew how to effectively discredit their worldviews before ever encountering them on our own.

Rachel Held Evans

#21. The Buddhists or the Jains do not depend upon God; but the whole force of their religion is directed to the great central truth in every religion, to evolve a God out of man. They have not seen the Father, but they have seen the Son. And he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father also.

Swami Vivekananda

#22. The Buddhists succumbed to the Muslims, the British brought in Christianity, and now the Muslims decide one faction of their religion is better than the other.

Jameson Currier

#23. The Buddhists are right. Guilty men are not sentenced to death, they are sentenced to life.

Steve Toltz

#24. Nowadays, people of many lands and cultures are being intermingled more and more. Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists may live in the same apartment building. In which case it is more important to accept each other's beliefs than to ask why everyone does not believe the same thing

Jostein Gaarder

#25. In general, I call her every night, and we talk for an hour, which is forty-five minutes of me, and fifteen minutes of her stirring her tea, which she steeps with the kind of Zen patience that would make Buddhists sit up in envy and then breathe through their envy and then move past their envy.

Aimee Bender

#26. History is the in-rushing toward what the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed, a transformational realm where the opposites are unified.

Terence McKenna

#27. 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

#28. The Dalai Lama acknowledges that he's met Westerners who to some extent are clearly Easterners at heart, and he would never want them not to become Buddhists just because they happened to be born in California.

Pico Iyer

#29. It was quite a collection of people: Hindus and Buddhists, rockers and doctors, all accomplished, all gathered in the United Church of Christ's Garden of Allah.

Brent Schlender

#30. Do what the Buddhists do. Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, 'Is today the day? Am I read? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person i want to be?'" He turned his head to his shoulder as if the bird were there now. "Is today the day I die?" he said.

Mitch Albom

#31. The Buddhists say envy is based on a delusion, the belief that the object of desire is what it seems to be.

Robert Cilley

#32. An unchecked ego is what the Buddhists call "a hungry ghost" - forever famished, eternally howling with need and greed.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#33. The opportunity here in the U.S. is so unique because we are so diverse, with so many different cultures living together. Christians, Jews, Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists, all with their own connections to the spiritual aspects of food and with lessons that we can learn from each other.

Marcus Samuelsson

#34. Muslims are just as peace-loving as the Christians, Hindus, Jews or Buddhists. It's the fundamentalists from whom people should keep distance, not the muslims.

Abhijit Naskar

#35. People who have failed at Christianity aren't likely to make great Buddhists.

Robertson Davies

#36. The perfect man of pagans was the perfection of the man there is; the perfect man of christians, the perfection of the man there isn't; the buddhists' perfect man, the perfection of not existing a man.

Fernando Pessoa

#37. Atheists are the fastest-growing religious subgroup in all fifty states. There are more atheists in this country than there are Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists combined and doubled. ["Unbelievable! Atheists to Rally in Record Numbers", Forbes, 21 March 2012]

David Silverman

#38. 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

#39. The goal of Buddhism is to create Buddhas, not Buddhists, as the goal of Christianity is to create Christs, not Christians.

Adyashanti

#40. Another of the things I started to do during this time was what Buddhists normally call "meditation" or, in Christian terms, "contemplative prayer". It began to supersede deipnosophy as my favorite hobby.

Sara Maitland

#41. The thing the Buddhists and the Sufis have in common is a belief that religious certainties are destructive.

Luke Rhinehart

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. One truth remains clear through the doubts and the questions, whether sinful or sanctified, virtue or vice:
While the past may belong to the Buddhists and Christians, the future belongs to the Buddhas and Christs.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

#45. Buddhists believe that you are who you are today is because of who you have been in all your past lives.

Frederick Lenz

#46. 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

#47. I spend a lot of time with Buddhists. I'm not a Buddhist, but their relationship with death interests me.

Joan Baez

#48. DO I BELIEVE THAT PEOPLE ARE BASICALLY GOOD? Yes, I do believe that, and I trust Buddhists and Hindus and Moslems to seek the good and to want to live in peace.

Anne Rice

#49. Not just Christians and Jews, but also Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and the followers of many other religions believe in values like peace, respect, tolerance and dignity. These are values that bring people together and enable us to build responsible and solid communities.

Alcee Hastings

#50. The Buddhists say that you have to think about your own death every single day. It makes you more humble to know this day is all there is, so be joyful and be grateful, and enjoy it.

Iris Krasnow

#51. I am burdened with what the Buddhists call the 'monkey mind'
the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit and howl.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#52. We all - whether naturalists, atheists, Buddhists, or Christians - see the world through the grid of an interpretive framework - and ultimately this interpretive framework is religious in nature, even if not allied with a particular institutional religion.

James K.A. Smith

#53. This, perhaps, goes to show that conditional self-esteem, as I have said for many years, is an insidious, real sickness, so much so that even Buddhists carelessly sneak it in and sometimes encourage their clients to achieve it.

Albert Ellis

#54. The Buddhists say that wisdom may be attained by reaching the three marks. The first is an understanding of the absence of self. The second is an understanding of the impermanence of all things. The third is an understanding of the unsatisfactory nature of ordinary experience.

Jenny Offill

#55. 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

#56. From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hinduism religion.

Swami Vivekananda

#57. Well neither of us were "Buddhists" then because it was new to us. We were 60's people. Psychedelic relics, you know ... whatever, right on, radicals and world changers, social peaceniks perhaps, with a Buddhist spiritual veneer.

Surya Das

#58. Although the Buddhists will tell you that desire is the root of suffering, my personal experience leads me to point the finger at system administration.

Philip Greenspun

#59. We've always seen ourselves as Indian. We've never seen ourselves as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or Buddhists.

Azim Premji

#60. Buddhists and Christians contrive to agree about death Making death their ideal basis for different ideals. The Communists however disapprove of death Except when practical.

William Empson

#61. Forgiveness is for Buddhists.

Tarryn Fisher

#62. He was teaching them to hate, wife. He tells them to hate Hindus and Buddhists and Jains and Sikhs and who knows what other vegetarians. Will you have hateful children, woman?

Salman Rushdie

#63. There is more ability to meditate in a rabbit than in one thousand Buddhists.

Daniel Marques

#64. I envy those Hindus and Buddhists who have in their religion philosophy and ancestor worship which build in the believer a continuity with the past, and that most important ingredient in the building of a nation - memory.

F. Sionil Jose

#65. I want to take you to a place of pure magic ... It's the place athletes call the "zone". Buddhists call "satori" and ravers call "trance". I call it the Silver Desert. It's a place of pure light that holds the dark within it. It's a place of pure rhythm.

Gabrielle Roth

#66. Tantric Buddhists don't believe in sin. Stupidity, yes, meaning we make ourselves or others suffer.

Frederick Lenz

#67. 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

#68. I love all religions ... If people become better Hindus, better Muslims, better Buddhists by our acts of love, then there is something else growing there." She upheld that there are many ways to God': "All is God - Buddists, Hindus, Christians, etc., all have access to the same God."

Mother Teresa

#69. We're all talking about the same thing, whether it's religious people or New Age spiritual people or Buddhists or scientists. We're all talking about having a sense of awe and wonder at something grander than ourselves.

Michael Shermer

#70. If there was any teacher in the world who insisted upon the inexorable law of cause and effect, it was Gautam, and yet my friends, the Buddhists outside India, would, if they could, avoid the effects of their own acts.

Mahatma Gandhi

#71. Buddhists advise us to "act always as if the future of the universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference." This serious playfulness makes it possible to be both engaged and carefree at the same time.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

#72. May He who is the Brahman of the Hindus, the Ahura-Mazda of the Zoroastrians, the Buddha of the Buddhists, the Jehovah of the Jews, the Father in Heaven of the Christians give strength to you to carry out your noble idea.

Swami Vivekananda

#73. Devout Buddhists believe in sonam - an accounting of righteous deeds that, when large enough, enables one to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth and transcend forever this world of pain and suffering.

Jon Krakauer

#74. Long before man traveled into space, rabbis debated how one would observe Shabbat there-not because they anticipated space travel but because Buddhists strive to live with questions and Jews would rather die.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#75. As Buddhists, our only task is to keep our room clean.

Frederick Lenz

#76. We'd rather have faithful Jews, Baptists or Buddhists than some of the Catholics who nearly run you over in the parking lot after Mass.

George Patterson

#77. Cambodia wanted no part of SEATO. We would look after ourselves as neutrals and Buddhists.

Norodom Sihanouk

#78. The Buddhists say if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees go weak, that's not the one. When you meet your 'soul mate' you'll feel calm. No anxiety, no agitation.

Monica Drake

#79. It's been a tough year ... Someone said I should send out Buddhist thank-you cards since Buddhists believe that anything that challenges you makes you pull yourself together.

Robin Williams

#80. We have Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, and their own path to grace is one that we have to revere and respect as much as our own

Barack Obama

#81. Any statement or claim that contradicts reason and valid experience cannot be upheld. Therefore, as Buddhists, we must discard any tenet that may contradict reason and valid experience.

Dalai Lama XIV

#82. Separating the God question from Buddhism does not make Buddhists atheists - within silence lies mystery. That doesn't mean, however, we should infer from this acknowledgement of the mystery a nod one way or another on the matter of the divine.

Andrew Furst

#83. It is important to remember always that the principle of egolessness does not mean that there was an ego in the first place, and the Buddhists did away with it. On the contrary, it means there was never any ego at all to begin with. To realize that is called egolessness.

Sogyal Rinpoche

#84. Buddhists and Taoists of the mainland, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan share the same roots and instructions and have always maintained sound exchanges.

Jia Qinglin

#85. It may seem unrealistic to think we can ever become free from hatred, but Buddhists have systematic methods for gradually developing a tolerance powerful enough to give such freedom.

Dalai Lama

#86. The researchers summarized: "A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.". Long ago, Buddhists reached much the same conclusion.

David Michie

#87. Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God.

Karen Armstrong

#88. If ever you're getting a dog, Francis, make sure it's a Buddhist. Good-natured dogs, the Buddhists. Never, never get a Mahommedan. They'll eat you sleeping. Never a Catholic dog. They'll eat you every day including Fridays.

Frank McCourt

#89. By identifying impermanence as a fundamental characteristic of existence itself, rather than a problem to be solved, the Buddhists are encouraging us to let go our hold on illusory solidity and learn to swim freely in the sea of change.

Andrew Olendzki

#90. In the Father's house we shall meet Buddhists and Jews, Muslims and Protestants ...

Helder Camara

#91. This same formula by which Buddhists so anti-rationalistically and anti-banausically describe the "relation" between soul and body also applies to the relation between lover and lover, parent and child, member and community.

Kenny Smith

#92. Joy can span from the pleasure of others' good fortune, what Buddhists call mudita, to the pleasure in others' misfortune, what the Germans call schadenfreude.

Dalai Lama XIV

#93. Anna used to say that the Buddhists meditate about reactions. That we cannot control WHAT happens to us, only how we react to it.

Suzanne Hayes

#94. The Buddhists have a story about blind men trying to describe an elephant by feeling it's various parts, and each describes the elephant according to the part he touched. That is the way we can hope to know God.

Kent Nerburn

#95. Buddhists understand that today and all other days have turned out the way they have because of karma. The interconnection of one moment with another moment, of one action with another action, is karma.

Frederick Lenz

#96. The Buddhists say there are 121 states of consciousness. Of these, only three involve misery or suffering. Most of us spend our time moving back and forth between these three.

Jenny Offill

#97. I'm fascinated by caddy Buddhists popping up all over Hollywood and people that take themselves too seriously.

Tig Notaro

#98. Western Buddhists in many ways are much serious Buddhists than Tibetans are.

Richard Gere

#99. When Buddhists say, "A bodhisattva fears not the result, but only the cause," they mean that we must expend the bulk of our energy planting good roots today, rather than fretting about the plants that are already growing from the roots we planted in the past.

Hsing Yun

#100. Our flesh, having been worn by the Most High Himself is the most noble mantle of all. The Manicheans and Buddhists and Platonists on the one hand, who belittle this flesh, and the gluttons and lechers and egoists on the other, who are slaves to it, are still living in division.

Mark Shea