Pema Chodron Quotes

I confess it is beyond our power to awaken the heart, but ordinarily this way does good.

We build our personalities laboriously and through many years, and we cannot order fundamental changes just because we might value their utility; no button reading "positive attitude" protrudes from our hearts, and no finger can coerce positivity into immediate action by a single and painless pressing.

Well, wherever you go, whatever you do, you're still you. You can change your surroundings, start a new life, but you'll always fall into the same old patterns, make the same kind of friends, commit the same mistakes. The thing you need to change is yourself.

We need to make material progress, but we need inner development too ... remember that the real development we seek is not in the buildings but in our hearts and minds.

There is a immense difference between training to do something and trying to do something....Sp iritual transformation is not a matter of trying harder, but of training wisely.... Following Jesus simply means learning from him how to arrange my life around activities that enable me to live in the fruit of the Spirit

God desires to change us from the inside out. Renewing our minds, starving our self-destructive tendencies, and teaching us to form new habits.

Repentance is not completed by a single act, it must be incorporated into our mind, till it become a fixed state, arising from a continual sense of our need of it.

One of the reasons it has seemed so difficult for a person to change his habits, his personality, or his way of life, has been that heretofore nearly all efforts at change have been directed to the circumference of the self, so to speak, rather than to the center.

Part of spiritual and emotional maturity is recognizing that it's not like you're going to try to fix yourself and become a different person. You remain the same person, but you become awakened.

Yes, now I understood for the first time that my soul was not so poor and empty as it had seemed to me, and that it had been only the sun that was lacking to open all its germs, and buds to the light.

Being somebody who wants to be religious doesn't make me perfect and doesn't make me necessarily any better than anybody else. It maybe makes me better than I would have been if I didn't have that level.

It's unfortunate, you know, that you can't change people's - habits, their personal habits.

We must alter our lives in order to alter our hearts, for it is impossible to live one way and pray another.

Transformation literally means going beyond your form.

Eventually, I joined a church. I didn't go there to find a boyfriend; I truly wasn't looking for anyone other than the person I wanted to be.

Things have changed. Now it's not the outward appearance, it's the inward man that I'm trying to change. And that's the message I bring to the people.

True change is within; leave the outside as it is.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds

When all is said and done, the only change that will make a difference is the transformation of the human heart.

We renovate the heart by, of course, changing it, but we can't do that, really, without changing the other essential parts of the human personality.

"This is why alchemy exists," the boy said. "So that everyone will search for his treasure, find it, and then want to be better than he was in his former life. Lead will play its role until the world has no further need for lead; and then lead will have to turn itself into gold. That's what alchemists do. They show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too."

If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you're needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.

Your emotional reactions to the evil you encounter and your judgments of it show you what you need to change in yourself. Changing those parts of your personality that judge, react in fear, and cannot love into acceptance, fearlessness, and love is the journey you were born to make.

According to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving. Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.