Patrick Page > Patrick's Quotes

“Those who regard worldly affairs as a hindrance to buddha dharma think only that there is no buddha dharma in the secular world; they do not understand that there is no secular world in buddha dharma.”
― Zen Master Dogen, Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen's Shobo Genzo

“My son, you are what you are in the present. Leave the past behind; don’t carry blame. Eliminate all anxiety about the future. Prepare to work for your evolution until the last instant of your life. Let no one be your judge; be your own judge. If you want to triumph, learn to fail. Never define yourself by what you possess. Never speak about yourself without allowing yourself the possibility to change. Think that you do not exist individually, that what you do does itself. Only by accepting that nothing is yours will you be the owner of all. Become a total offering. Give, but oblige no one to receive. Make no one feel guilty; you are an accomplice to whatever happens. Stop asking for things and start thanking. Obtain in order to give away.”
― Alejandro Jodorowsky, Where the Bird Sings Best

“It is strange how often a heart must be broken
Before the years can make it wise.”
― Sara Teasdale, The Collected Poems

“When there is no way out, there is still always a way through. So don’t turn away from the pain. Face it. Feel it fully. Feel it — don’t think about it! Express it if necessary, but don’t create a script in your mind around it. Give all your attention to the feeling, not to the person, event, or situation that seems to have caused it. Don’t let the mind use the pain to create a victim identity for yourself out of it. Feeling sorry for yourself and telling others your story will keep you stuck in suffering. Since it is impossible to get away from the feeling, the only possibility of change is to move into it; otherwise, nothing will shift. So give your complete attention to what you feel, and refrain from mentally labeling it. As you go into the feeling, be intensely alert. At first, it may seem like a dark and terrifying place, and when the urge to turn away from it comes, observe it but don’t act on it. Keep putting your attention on the pain, keep feeling the grief, the fear, the dread, the loneliness, whatever it is. Stay alert, stay present — present with your whole Being, with every cell of your body. As you do so, you are bringing a light into this darkness. This is the flame of your consciousness.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
― Anne Lamott

“You speak of doing good to the world. Is the world such a small thing? And who are you, pray, to do good to the world? First realise God, see Him by means of spiritual discipline. If He imparts power you can do good to others; otherwise not.”
― Sri Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Ramakrishna

“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d”
― Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

“If you think you are big, you become small. If you know you are nothing, you become unlimited. That’s the beauty of being a human being.”
― Jaggi Vasudev, Pebbles Of Wisdom

“Remember that your perception of the world is a reflection of your state of consciousness. You are not separate from it, and there is no objective world out there. Every moment, your consciousness creates the world that you inhabit. One of the greatest insights that has come out of modern physics is that of the unity between the observer and the observed: the person conducting the experiment — the observing consciousness — cannot be separated from the observed phenomena, and a different way of looking causes the observed phenomena to behave differently. If you believe, on a deep level, in separation and the struggle for survival, then you see that belief reflected all around you and your perceptions are governed by fear. You inhabit a world of death and of bodies fighting, killing, and devouring each other. Nothing is what it seems to be. The world that you create and see through the egoic mind may seem a very imperfect place, even a vale of tears. But whatever you perceive is only a kind of symbol, like an image in a dream. It is how your consciousness interprets and interacts with the molecular energy dance of the universe. This energy is the raw material of so-called physical reality. You see it in terms of bodies and birth and death, or as a struggle for survival. An infinite number of completely different interpretations, completely different worlds, is possible and, in fact, exists — all depending on the perceiving consciousness. Every being is a focal point of consciousness, and every such focal point creates its own world, although all those worlds are interconnected. There is a human world, an ant world, a dolphin world, and so on. There are countless beings whose consciousness frequency is so different from yours that you are probably unaware of their existence, as they are of yours. Highly conscious beings who are aware of their connectedness with the Source and with each other would inhabit a world that to you would appear as a heavenly realm — and yet all worlds are ultimately one.”
― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

“Creativity can only come from silence. If we maintain two minutes of silence every day, then we will see that a whole new dimension of life opens up.”
― Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Management Mantras

“I once heard an artist say that when a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some.”
― Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

“There is neither creation nor destruction,
neither destiny nor free will, neither
path nor achievement.
This is the final truth.”
― Ramana Maharshi, Sayings of Sri Ramana Maharshi

“It is very difficult also to sacrifice one's suffering. A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff

“He has no need for faith who knows the uncreated, who has cut off rebirth, who has destroyed any opportunity for good or evil, and cast away all desire. He is indeed the ultimate man.”
― Gautama Buddha, The Dhammapada

“How can love be worthy of its name if one selects solely the pretty things and leaves out the hardships? It is easy to enjoy the good and dislike the bad. Anybody can do that. The real challenge is to love the good and the bad together, not because you need to take the rough with the smooth but because you need to go beyond such descriptions and accept love in its entirety.”
― Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

“Everything that happens to you is a form of instruction if you pay attention.”
― Robert Greene, Mastery

“Inevitably is an excellent word—inevitably means you’re on a train, and the train is going one way, and you’re at the front of the train running as fast as you can toward the back of the train, in the opposite direction from where the train is headed. But it doesn’t matter, because when the train gets to the station, you get there too. That’s inevitably. That’s my life.”
― Ram Dass, Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart

“We see with our eyes. We know with our hearts. Outside...Inside.”
― Jim Henson

“Just look at life with more playful eyes. Don’t be serious. Seriousness becomes like a blindness. Don’t pretend to be a thinker, a philosopher. Just simply be a human being. The whole world is showering its joy on you in so many ways, but you are too serious, you cannot open your heart.”
― Osho

“So love is the recognition of oneness in a world of duality. This is the birth of God into the world of form. Love makes the world less worldly, less dense, more transparent to the divine dimension, the light of consciousness itself.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka

“You have to understand that it is your attempt to get special experiences from life that makes you miss the actual experience of life. Life is not something you get; it’s something you experience.”
― Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

“people who have failed in their lives, they are suffering their failure. People who have succeeded in their life, they are suffering their success.”
― Jaggi Vasudev, Inner Management: In the Presence of the Master

“In the story of the Buddha’s life we hear of the temptations of Mara, which are extremely subtle. The first temptation is fear of physical destruction. The last is the seduction by the daughters of Mara. This seduction, the seduction of spiritual materialism, is extremely powerful because it is the seduction of thinking that “I” have achieved something. If we think we have achieved something, that we have “made it,” then we have been seduced by Mara’s daughters, the seduction of spiritual materialism.”
― Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

“The content of your consciousness awareness is the content of your experience—is what manifests as your outer reality. The inner manifests as the outer. That is it, period. That is the great understanding. That is the only rule. Consciousness creates everything except consciousness. Remember this. Do not forget. Your imagination is your greatest tool. Use it correctly, with impeccable discipline. Through your imagination—the thoughts and images you entertain in your mind—you determine the outcomes that you experience, all the outcomes, all the circumstances and events in your life. As long as you know of your own power, as long as you know the experiences and outcomes you desire truly exist and you entertain thoughts and images of only that outcome and nothing else, it will manifest in your experience. No other result is possible. Have you got that?" I”
― M.G. Hawking, ‘The Golden Crown’ - Manuscript of the Great Female Master Kalika-Khenmetaten, circa 1370 B.C.

“There are those who don’t believe in God and yet do good. There are those who believe in God and kill for that belief; those who prepare for war because they claim they want peace, and so on. So one has to ask oneself what need there is to believe at all in anything, though this doesn’t deny the extraordinary mystery of life. But belief is a word, a thought, and this is not the thing, anymore than your name is actually you.
Through experience you hope to touch the truth of your belief, to prove it to yourself, but this belief conditions your experience. It isn’t that the experience comes to prove the belief, but rather that the belief begets the experience. Your belief in God will give you the experience of what you call God. You will always experience what you believe and nothing else.”
― J. Krishnamurti, The Krishnamurti Reader

“Well-being is the state of having arrived at the full development of reason: reason not in the sense of a merely intellectual judgment, but in that of grasping truth by “letting things be” (to use Heidegger’s term) as they are. Well-being is possible only to the degree to which one has overcome one’s narcissism; to the degree to which one is open, responsive, sensitive, awake, empty (in the Zen sense). Well-being means to be fully related to man and nature affectively, to overcome separateness and alienation, to arrive at the experience of oneness with all that exists—and yet to experience myself at the same time as the separate entity I am, as the individual. Well-being means to be fully born, to become what one potentially is; it means to have the full capacity for joy and for sadness or, to put it still differently, to awake from the half-slumber the average man lives in, and to be fully awake. If it is all that, it means also to be creative; that is, to react and to respond to myself, to others, to everything that exists—to react and to respond as the real, total man I am to the reality of everybody and everything as he or it is. In this act of true response lies the area of creativity, of seeing the world as it is and experiencing it as my world, the world created and transformed by my creative grasp of it, so that the world ceases to be a strange world “over there” and becomes my world. Well-being means, finally, to drop one’s Ego, to give up greed, to case chasing after the preservation and the aggrandizement of the Ego, to be and to experience one’s self in the act of being, not in having, preserving, coveting, using.”
― Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism

“I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.”
― seneca, Peace of Mind: De Tranquillitate Animi

“I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”
― Albert Einstein