Ajahn Brahm > Quotes

“When the weather is hot, keep a cool mind. When the weather is cold, keep a warm heart.”
― Ajahn Brahm

“Love is not liking somebody. Anyone can do that. Love is loving things that sometimes you don't like. ”
― Ajahn Brahm

“We should always be grateful for the faults in our partner because if they didn't have those faults from the start, they would have been able to marry someone much better than us”
― Ajahn Brahm, Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties

“When life is good do not take it for granted as it will pass. Be mindful, be compassionate and nurture the circumstances that find you in this good time so it will last longer. When life falls apart always remember that this too will pass. Life will have its unexpected turns.”
― Ajahn Brahm

“To think that you will be happy by becoming something else is delusion. Becoming something else just exchanges one form of suffering for another form of suffering. But when you are content with who you are now, junior or senior, married or single, rich or poor, then you are free of suffering.”
― Ajahn Brahm, Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties

“Berapa banyak waktu dalam hidup yang kita sia-siakan karena mengkhawatirkan sesuatu yang, pada saat itu, tak memiliki solusi, dan karena itu, bukanlah sebuah masalah?”
― Ajahn Brahm

“Better lite a candle than complain about the darkness”
― Ajahn Brahm

“How many times have you tried to solve “the problem”? you’ll be trying to solve it not just until you die but for many more lifetimes. Instead, understand that this world is just the play of the senses. It’s the five khandhas doing their thing; it has nothing to do with you. It’s just people being people, the world being the world.”
― Ajahn Brahm, The Art of Disappearing: Buddha's Path to Lasting Joy

“Whatever you do in your life, Son, the door of my heart will always be open to you.”
― Ajahn Brahm, Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties

“Any place you don´t want to be, no matter how comfortable, is a prison for you.”
― Ajahn Brahm, Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties

“Silence is so much more productive of wisdom and clarity than thinking.”
― Ajahn Brahm, Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond: A Meditator's Handbook

“Why allow other people to control your inner happiness?”
― Ajahn Brahm, Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties

“any place you don’t want to be is a prison.”
― Ajahn Brahm, The Art of Disappearing: Buddha's Path to Lasting Joy

“Grief is what we add on to loss. It is a learned response, specific to some cultures only. It is not universal and it is not unavoidable. ... Grief is seeing only what has been taken away from you. The celebration of a life is recognizing all that we were blessed with, and feeling so very grateful.”
― Ajahn Brahm, Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties

“We all deserve to get away and have some peace; and others deserve the peace of us getting out of their way!”
― Ajahn Brahm, Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties

“Careful patience is the fastest way!”
― Ajahn Brahm, Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond: A Meditator's Handbook

“9. Your Photo Album Many people have a photo album. In it they keep memories of the happiest of times. There may be a photo of them playing by the beach when they were very young. There may be the picture with their proud parents at their graduation ceremony. There will be many shots of their wedding that captures their love at one of its highest points. And there will be holiday snapshots too. But you will never find in your album any photographs of miserable moments of your life. Absent is the photo of you outside the principal’s office at school. Missing is any photo of you studying hard late into the night for your exams. No one that I know has a picture of their divorce in their album, nor one of them in a hospital bed terribly sick, nor stuck in busy traffic on the way to work on a Monday morning! Such depressing shots never find their way into anyone’s photo album. Yet there is another photo album that we keep in our heads called our memory. In that album, we include so many negative photographs. There you find so many snapshots of insulting arguments, many pictures of the times when you were so badly let down, and several montages of the occasions where you were treated cruelly. There are surprisingly few photos in that album of happy moments. This is crazy! So let’s do a purge of the photo album in our head. Delete the uninspiring memories. Trash them. They do not belong in this album. In their place, put the same sort of memories that you have in a real photo album. Paste in the happiness of when you made up with your partner, when there was that unexpected moment of real kindness, or whenever the clouds parted and the sun shone with extraordinary beauty. Keep those photos in your memory. Then when you have a few spare moments, you will find yourself turning its pages with a smile, or even with laughter.”
― Ajahn Brahm, Don't Worry, Be Grumpy: Inspiring Stories for Making the Most of Each Moment

“Sir, if someone took a Buddhist holy book and flushed it down my toilet, the first thing I would do is call a plumber!”
― Ajahn Brahm, Don't Worry, Be Grumpy: Inspiring Stories for Making the Most of Each Moment

“The goal of this meditation is beautiful silence, stillness, and clarity of mind.”
― Ajahn Brahm, Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond: A Meditator's Handbook

“Another simile is that of the man who was born and raised in a prison and who has never set foot outside. All he knows is prison life. He would have no conception of the freedom that is beyond his world. And he would not understand that prison is suffering. If anybody suggested that his world was dukkha, he would disagree, for prison is the limit of his experience. But one day he might find the escape tunnel dug long ago that leads beyond the prison walls to the unimaginable and expansive world of real freedom. Only when he has entered that tunnel and escaped from his prison does he realize how much suffering prison actually was, and the end of that suffering, escaping from jail is happiness.

In this simile the prison is the body, the high prison walls are the five senses, and the relentless demanding prison guard is one's own will, the doer. The tunnel dug long ago, through which one escapes, is called jhana [meditation] (as at AN IX, 42). Only when one has experienced jhana does one realize that the five-sense world, even at its best, is really a five-walled prison, some parts of it is a little more comfortable but still a jail with everyone on death row! Only after deep jhana does one realize that "will" was the torturer, masquerading as freedom, but preventing one ever resting happily at peace. Only outside of prison can one gain the data that produces the deep insight that discovers the truth about dukkha.

In summary, without experience of jhana, one's knowledge of the world is too limited to fully understand dukkha, as required by the first noble truth, and proceed to enlightenmen.”
― Ajahn Brahm

“All you need to do is follow the instructions: Sit down, shut up, watch, and don’t get involved. Gradually, the meditation experience will open up all by itself.”
― Ajahn Brahm, The Art of Disappearing: Buddha's Path to Lasting Joy

“I figured out once that if you decide to have fun when you give a public talk, then you relax. It is psychologically impossible to have fear and fun at the same time. When I am relaxed, ideas flow freely into my mind during my talk, then leave through my mouth with the smoothness of eloquence. Moreover, the audience doesn’t get bored when it is fun.”
― Ajahn Brahm, Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties

“Tugovati znači vidjeti samo ono što vam je oduzeto. Slavljenje života znači prepoznati sve čime smo blagoslovljeni i osjećati zahvalnost.”
― Ajahn Brahm, Krava koja je plakala : I druge budističke priče o sreći

“Disengaging means you leave these things alone and you’re not concerned or worried about them.”
― Ajahn Brahm, The Art of Disappearing: Buddha's Path to Lasting Joy

“Your job is to be free, not to carry around the so-called attainments or failures of the past.”
― Ajahn Brahm, The Art of Disappearing: Buddha's Path to Lasting Joy

“If you know how to let go and be at peace, you know everything you need to know about living in the world.” – Ajahn Brahm”
― Ajahn Brahm

“The secret of life is ... everything is out of control.”
― Ajahn Brahm

“It is the high value that one gives to one’s own thoughts that is the main obstacle to silent awareness. Wisely removing the importance that one gives to thinking, and realizing the greater accuracy of silent awareness, opens the door to inner silence.”
― Ajahn Brahm, Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond: A Meditator's Handbook

“Delusion is so incredibly powerful, much more pervasive than most people know. As Voltaire quipped, “The only way to comprehend the mathematical concept of infinity is to contemplate the extent of human stupidity.”
― Ajahn Brahm, Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond: A Meditator's Handbook

“Instead, understand that this world is just the play of the senses. It’s the five khandhas doing their thing; it has nothing to do with you. It’s just people being people, the world being the world. Sometimes”
― Ajahn Brahm, The Art of Disappearing: Buddha's Path to Lasting Joy