Simon Parke > Quotes

“My house was built by a partnership called Desire and Ignorance; they often work together, and always with disastrous consequences. It’s surprising they aren’t more talked of in the press. They are great survivors but incompetent builders. Desire is famous only for pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, while Ignorance casts a veil over all his unexamined assumptions and makes wrong ones every hour. Together, they created the psychological reality where I live. Hardly a surprise, therefore, if it’s unfit for purpose!”
― Simon Parke, One-Minute Mindfulness: How to Live in the Moment

“We don’t live and learn; we live and confirm discredited patterns of understanding.”
― Simon Parke, One-Minute Mindfulness: How to Live in the Moment

“A human being,’ said Einstein, ‘is part of the whole, which we call the Universe; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
― Simon Parke, One-Minute Mindfulness: How to Live in the Moment

“Acceptance is not opposed to change; instead acceptance brings a different energy to the situation. Acceptance takes the heat of desire out of our future planning; it replaces wanting with a more primal energy comprised of transformed attitudes and new being; and in the face of these, even empires can crumble. New being doesn’t desire change; it is change.”
― Simon Parke, One-Minute Mindfulness: How to Live in the Moment

“As Abraham Maslow said, ‘If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
― Simon Parke, One-Minute Mindfulness: How to Live in the Moment

“It is a strange thing that as we empty ourselves, we become more solid people.”
― Simon Parke, One-Minute Mindfulness: How to Live in the Moment

“In Buddhist thought, enlightenment is understood not as the presence of something but as the absence of something: the permanent extinction in our lives of greed, hatred and delusion. Enlightenment is not the acquisition of new ideas but the patient removal of old ways of being our selves.”
― Simon Parke, One-Minute Mindfulness: How to Live in the Moment

“If rush and impatience is your manner of spiritual travel, don’t expect to arrive anywhere beautiful.”
― Simon Parke, One-Minute Mindfulness: How to Live in the Moment