Eknath Easwaran Quotes

A mind that is fast is sick. A mind that is slow is sound. A mind that is still is divine.

A calm mind releases the most precious capacity a human being can have: the capacity to turn anger into compassion, fear into fearlessness, and hatred into love.

Meditation is warm-up exercise for the mind, so that you can jog through the rest of the day without getting agitated or spraining your patience.

When someone at peace and free from hurry enters a room, that person has a calming effect on everyone present.

Patience can't be acquired overnight. It is just like building up a muscle. Every day you need to work on it.

Nothing really worth having comes quickly and easily. If it did, I doubt that we would ever grow.

Through meditation and by giving full attention to one thing at a time, we can learn to direct attention where we choose.

When we go slower, we are more patient and when we are more patient we have a choice in how we respond.

The real essentials of life - compassion, kindness, good will, forgiveness - are what is fundamental to living as a true human being.

When we meditate every morning we are putting on armor for the day's battle against our own impatience, inadequacy, resentment, and hostility.

Every angry thought makes it a little easier to get angry the next time, and a little more likely.

Love is so exquisitely elusive. It cannot be bought, cannot be badgered, cannot be hijacked. It is available only in one rare form: as the natural response of a healthy mind and healthy heart.

When we try to get ourselves out of the way, we can understand much better the needs of the people closest to us.

Lasting change happens when people see for themselves that a different way of life is more fulfilling than their present one.

The Lord is a good psychologist: he knows the way our minds run. Turmoil can be the Lord's way of tapping us on the shoulder and saying, 'Don't forget me.'

This is the central principle of meditation: we become what we meditate on.

We have to have a purpose greater than the endless struggle to satisfy personal desires.

Whatever we have done, we can always make amends for it without ever looking back in guilt or sorrow.

Human relationships are the perfect tool for sanding away our rough edges and getting at the core of divinity within us.

The spiritual life is a call to action. But it is a call to ... action without any selfish attachment to the results.

Activity is not achievement. It is not enough to rush about beginning a lot of things and keeping busy. A well-spent life is one that rounds out what it has begun.

Imagine a hot tub for the mind. That is what meditation is; it can bathe your mind in relaxing thoughts.

Our deepest need is for the joy that comes with knowing we are of genuine use to others.

The capacity to be patient, to bear with others through thick and thin, is within the reach of anyone.

When we truly are putting others first, we cannot but feel at peace with ourselves.

God made the senses turn outwards, man therefore looks outwards, not into himself. But occasionally a daring soul, desiring immortality, has looked back and found himself.

As we get deeper, we move closer and closer to other people; we feel closer to life as a whole.

When the mind is still, we can become an instrument of peace.

Wisdom may be perennial, but to see its relevance we must see it lived out.

When we are at home with ourselves, we are at home everywhere in the world. When we have found peace within ourselves, peace and love follow us wherever we go.

The ancestor of every destructive action, every destructive decision, is a negative thought.

Like Gandhi, like the Buddha, like all great spiritual teachers, Easwaran had no use for beliefs unless they generated actions. Doing, not saying, is what counts.

Instead of looking at difficulties as deprivations, we can learn to recognize them as opportunities for deepening and widening our love.

We become in part what our senses take in.

Mastery does not come from dabbling. We have to be prepared to pay the price. We need to have the sustained enthusiasm that motivates us to give our best.

Having come to realize in the first stage of meditation that we are not our bodies, in the second stage we make an even more astounding discovery; we are not our minds either.

Everything beautiful has to be worked for.

By removing that which is petty and self-seeking, we bring forth all that is glorious and mindful of the whole.

Two forces pervade human life, the Gita says: the upward thrust of evolution and the downward pull of our evolutionary past.

Those who indulge themselves in sense stimulation throughout their lives often end up exhausted, with an enfeebled will and little capacity to love others.

The goal of meditation is awareness, not relaxation.

Anything that tends to make us elated is inevitably going to throw us into depression.

The mind is powerful, but it needs something to hold on to so it doesn't wander.

I have tremendous respect for anyone who can control his palate enough to learn not only to drink beer but to enjoy it too.

Peace would always be less compelling than war. Perhaps that was why there was so little of it in the world. (p. 160)

We can all avoid travel that is unnecessary we do not need to travel around the world when the source of all joy and all beauty is right within us.

Judged by the normal standards of human affairs, the lives of men and women of God may look overburdened with suffering, and even inconclusive.