Shankara's Quotes

#1. Discrimination, viveka, means you know the difference between the transient and the eternal. That's what discrimination means in Shankara's yoga.

Frederick Lenz

#2. Each thing tends to move towards its own nature. I always desire happiness which is my true nature. My nature is never a burden to me. Happiness is never a burden to me, whilst sorrow is.

Adi Shankara

#3. It was the best kind of November day. Cold and crisp, but not quite freezing, not icy. Just cold enough that she could justifiably wear all her favorite clothes - cardigans and tights and leg warmers.

Rainbow Rowell

#4. What destroys a craving? Realization of one's true self. - Shankara, a ninth-century sage

Carol Cottrill

#5. Pantagruel was telling me that he believed the queen had given the symbolic word used among her subjects to denote sovereign good cheer, when she said to her tabachins, A panacea.

Francois Rabelais

#6. I throw raps that attacks like the Japs at Pearl Harbor

GZA

#7. What are you wearing?" Blayne glanced down at the tiny velvet green minidress she wore.
"Jess asked us to be Santa's helpers tonight."
"You look like Santa's whores.

Shelly Laurenston

#8. Reality can be experienced only with the eye of understanding, not just by a scholar

Adi Shankara

#9. Do not be proud of wealth, people, relations and friends, or youth. All these are snatched by time in the blink of an eye. Giving up this illusory world, know and attain the Supreme.

Adi Shankara

#10. Curb your senses and your mind and see the Lord within your heart.

Adi Shankara

#11. Give up identification with this mass of flesh as well as with what thinks it a mass. Both are intellectual imaginations. Recognise your true self as undifferentiated awareness, unaffected by time, past, present or future, and enter Peace.

Adi Shankara

#12. Do not look at anybody in terms of friend or foe, brother or cousin; do not fritter away your mental energies in thoughts of friendship or enemity. Seeking the Self everywhere, be amiable and equal-minded towards all, treating all alike.

Adi Shankara

#13. What is enquiry into the Truth? It is the firm conviction that the Self is real, and all, other than That, is unreal.

Adi Shankara

#14. Any movement of the mind or will toward truth, goodness, beauty, or any other transcendental end is an adherence of the soul to God. It is a finite participation in the highest truth of existence. As Shankara says, the fullness of being, lacking nothing, is also boundless consciousness,

David Bentley Hart

#15. Thus one should know oneself to be of the nature of Existence-Consciousness-Bliss[Sat-Chit-Ananda].

Adi Shankara

#16. The treasure I have found cannot be described in words, the mind cannot conceive of it.

Adi Shankara

#17. All the manifested world of things and beings are projected by imagination upon the substratum which is the Eternal All pervading Vishnu , whose nature is Existence- Intelligence ; just as the different ornaments are all made out of the same gold.

Adi Shankara

#18. Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.
Both theses are equally well-founded, hence equally true, as each of us can discover for himself in the space of an hour, sometimes of a minute. ...

Emil Cioran

#19. Action cannot destroy ignorance, for it is not in conflict with ignorance. Knowledge alone destroys ignorance, as light destroys dense darkness.

Shankara

#20. As gold purified in a furnace loses its impurities and achieves its own true nature, the mind gets rid of the impurities of the attributes of delusion, attachment and purity through meditation and attains Reality.

Adi Shankara

#21. Just as a stone, a tree, a straw, grain, a mat, a cloth, a pot, and so on, when burned, are reduced to earth (from which they came), so the body and its sense organs, on being burned in the fire of Knowledge, become Knowledge and are absorbed in Brahman, like darkness in the light of the sun.

Adi Shankara

#22. Present-day Hinduism and Buddhism were growths from the same branch. Buddhism degenerated, and Shankara lopped it off!

Swami Vivekananda

#23. Space seems broken and diverse because of the many forms in it. Remove the forms and pure space remains. So, too with the Omnipresent Self.

Adi Shankara

#24. The world, like a dream full of attachments and aversions seems real until the awakening.

Adi Shankara

#25. Loud speech, profusion of words, and possessing skillfulness in expounding scriptures are merely for the enjoyment of the learned. They do not lead to liberation.

Adi Shankara

#26. I'm stingy and I'm proud of the reputation.

Ingvar Kamprad

#27. To be free from bondage the wise person must practise discrimination between One-Self and the ego-self.
By that alone you will become full of joy, recognising Self as Pure Being, Consciousness and Bliss.

Adi Shankara

#28. But the jiva [living being] is endowed with ego and his knowledge is limited, whereas Ishwar is without ego and is omniscient.

Adi Shankara

#29. The witness of the three states of consciousness [waking, dream and deep sleep] and of the nature of Existence-Consciousness-Bliss is the Self

Adi Shankara

#30. I saw 'Star Wars' when I was seven years old, and it changed my life.

James Altucher

#31. Knowing that I am different from the body, I need not neglect the body. It is a vehicle that I use to transact with the world. It is the temple which houses the Pure Self within.

Adi Shankara

#32. From a clear knowledge of the Bhagavad-gita all the goals of human existence become fulfilled. Bhagavad-gita is the manifest quintessence of all the teachings of the Vedic scriptures.

Adi Shankara

#33. There is sorrow in finitude. The Self is beyond time, space and objects. It is infinite and hence of the nature of absolute happiness.

Adi Shankara

#34. You never identify yourself with the shadows cast by your body, or with its reflection, or with the body you see in a dream or in your imagination. Therefore you should not identify yourself with this living body either.

Adi Shankara