Meditation Quotes for Calm and Focus

These Meditation Quotes will help you to learn from others how to achieve a quiet, calm and focused mind.

They are drawn from a wide historical and geographical spectrum of writers, thinkers, activists and many other disciplines.

If you are unsure when you should meditate, check out the benefits of morning meditation.

Scroll through and enjoy.

Meditation Quotes

“The Way to do is to be.”

― Lao Tzu

“Sometimes you need to sit lonely on the floor in a quiet room in order to hear your own voice and not let it drown in the noise of others.”

― Charlotte Eriksson, You’re Doing Just Fine

“Undisturbed calmness of mind is attained by cultivating friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and indifference toward the wicked.”

― Patanjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.”

― Voltaire

“Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.”

― Thich Nhat Hang, Stepping into Freedom: Rules of Monastic Practice for Novices

Source: William Farlow on Unsplash

“It is never too late to turn on the light. Your ability to break an unhealthy habit or turn off an old tape doesn’t depend on how long it has been running; a shift in perspective doesn’t depend on how long you’ve held on to the old view.

When you flip the switch in that attic, it doesn’t matter whether it’s been dark for ten minutes, ten years or ten decades.

The light still illuminates the room and banishes the murkiness, letting you see the things you couldn’t see before.

It’s never too late to take a moment to look.”

― Sharon Salzberg, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation

“In meditation we discover our inherent restlessness. Sometimes we get up and leave. Sometimes we sit there but our bodies wiggle and squirm and our minds go far away.

This can be so uncomfortable that we feel’s it’s impossible to stay.

Yet this feeling can teach us not just about ourselves but what it is to be human…we really don’t want to stay with the nakedness of our present experience. It goes against the grain to stay present. These are the times when only gentleness and a sense of humor can give us the strength to settle down…so whenever we wander off, we gently encourage ourselves to “stay” and settle down. Are we experiencing restlessness? Stay! Are fear and loathing out of control? Stay! Aching knees and throbbing back? Stay! What’s for lunch? Stay! I can’t stand this another minute! Stay!”

― Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

― T.S. Eliot

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“I have lived with several Zen masters — all of them cats.”

― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, Meditation Quotes

Source: Audrey Fretz on Unsplash

“Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.”

― George Mac Donald, Wilfrid Cumbermede, Meditation Quotes

“If you don’t have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain’t getting them.”

― Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

“You asked me how to get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don’t use logic when I do it. Logic’s the first thing you have to get rid of.”

― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories, Meditation Quotes

“When somebody plays music, you listen. you just follow those sounds, and eventually you understand the music.

The point can’t be explained in words because music is not words, but after listening for a while, you understand the point of it, and that point is the music itself.

In exactly the same way, you can listen to all experiences.”

― Alan Wilson Watts, Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation

“To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still.”

― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meditation Quotes

“The soil in which the meditative mind can begin is the soil of everyday life, the strife, the pain, and the fleeting joy.

It must begin there, and bring order, and from there move endlessly. But if you are concerned only with making order, then that very order will bring about its own limitation, and the mind will be its prisoner.

In all this movement you must somehow begin from the other end, from the other shore, and not always be concerned with this shore or how to cross the river.

You must take a plunge into the water, not knowing how to swim.

And the beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are, where you are going, what the end is.”

― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meditation Quotes

“Your duty is to be and not to be this or that. ‘I am that I am’ sums up the whole truth. The method is summed up in the words ‘Be still’.

What does stillness mean? It means destroy yourself.

Because any form or shape is the cause for trouble. Give up the notion that ‘I am so and so’. All that is required to realize the Self is to be still. What can be easier than that?”

― Ramana Maharshi, Meditation Quotes

“If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.”

― Amit Ray, Om Chanting and Meditation

“Looking at beauty in the world, is the first step of purifying the mind.”

― Amit Ray, Meditation: Insights and Inspirations

“Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements. Once you understand the grammar of yoga; you can write your poetry of movements.”

― Amit Ray, Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style

“Self-observation is the first step of inner unfolding.”

― Amit Ray, Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style, Meditation Quotes

“Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.”

― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life, Meditation Quotes

“I’m simply saying that there is a way to be sane. I’m saying that you can get rid of all this insanity created by the past in you. Just by being a simple witness of your thought processes.

It is simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts, passing before you. Just witnessing, not interfering not even judging, because the moment you judge you have lost the pure witness. The moment you say “this is good, this is bad,” you have already jumped onto the thought process.

It takes a little time to create a gap between the witness and the mind. Once the gap is there, you are in for a great surprise, that you are not the mind, that you are the witness, a watcher.

And this process of watching is the very alchemy of real religion. Because as you become more and more deeply rooted in witnessing, thoughts start disappearing. You are, but the mind is utterly empty.

That’s the moment of enlightenment. That is the moment that you become for the first time an unconditioned, sane, really free human being.”

― Osho, Meditation Quotes

“One thing: you have to walk, and create the way by your walking; you will not find a ready-made path. It is not so cheap, to reach to the ultimate realization of truth.

You will have to create the path by walking yourself; the path is not ready-made, lying there and waiting for you. It is just like the sky: the birds fly, but they don’t leave any footprints.

You cannot follow them; there are no footprints left behind.”

― Osho, Meditation Quotes

“Nobody can say anything about you. Whatsoever people say is about themselves. But you become very shaky, because you are still clinging to a false centre.

That false centre depends on others, so you are always looking to what people are saying about you. And you are always following other people, you are always trying to satisfy them. You are always trying to be respectable; you are always trying to decorate your ego.

This is suicidal. Rather than being disturbed by what others say, you should start looking inside yourself…

Whenever you are self-conscious you are simply showing that you are not conscious of the self at all.

You don’t know who you are. If you had known, then there would have been no problem— then you are not seeking opinions. Then you are not worried what others say about you— it is irrelevant!

When you are self-conscious you are in trouble. When you are self-conscious you are really showing symptoms that you don’t know who you are.

Your very self-consciousness indicates that you have not come home yet.”

― Osho, Meditation Quotes

“Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter.

Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will.

Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.”

― Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic, Meditation Quotes

“The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people.

But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God.

Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety.”

― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island, Meditation Quotes

Meditation Quotes

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