meditative lifestyle Quotes

We are not social workers. We are contemplatives in the heart of the world.

I made the remark that I don't avoid people in order to live quietly, but rather in order to be able to die quietly.

Nor has he lived in vain, who from his cradle to his grave has passed his life in seclusion.

I intended to portray the joy, anger, sorrow and pleasure of our lives through four seasons and through the life of a monk who lives in a temple on Jusan Pond surrounded only by nature.

Meditation has to spread all over your life. Whatsoever you do, do meditatively. Walk meditatively, eat meditatively. If you are making love, make love meditatively. Meditation has to become your life twenty-four hours a day; then only the transformation. Then you go beyond sex, you go beyond body, you go beyond mind. And for the first time you become aware of godliness, of ecstasy, of bliss, of truth, of liberation.

In general, it can be said that no contemplative life is possible without ascetic self-discipline. One must learn to survive without the habit-forming luxuries which get such a hold on men today. I do not say that to be a contemplative one absolutely has to go without smoking or without alcohol, but certainly one must be able to use these things without being dominated by an uncontrolled need for them.

If you're living your life avoiding stress, you must be living on an ashram.

To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition.

Life ought to be lived on a basis of silence, where truth blossoms.

Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.

I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be. It's wonderful to have someone like that around, you always feel you can count on them. You can go away and come back, you can change your mind and your hairdo and your politics, and when you get through doing all these upsetting things, you look around and there they are, just the way they were, just being.

Henry David Thoreau is very independent-minded, very iconoclastic, and had quite a corrosive sense of humor. I think that I probably have grown up to have a Thoreauvian perspective on many things. Though in other ways I live a life he would not have approved of. He believed to simplify, simplify, simplify. Make your life very clear and plain and meditative and not confused. Sometimes my life, in fact, is confused.

I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be.