Mind

"Stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it."

"Yoga practice can make us more and more sensitive to subtler and subtler sensations in the body. Paying attention to and staying with finer and finer sensations within the body is one of the surest ways to steady the wandering mind. (39)"

"Temptation is stronger in the minds of people who are in doubt. Prayer makes it weaker."

"The mind is left bereft when it is nothing more than a tool of regurgitation."

"The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity; there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep."

"When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as "rootless and stemless." We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don't condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is."

"Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize 'The stars are words' and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind."

"In that little pocket-size world of his, he was the absolute master."

"Moods are not to be confused with emotions. Moods will dispose you to having an emotion. Certain moods you're more likely to get angry than others, as we all know, but emotion is not the same as mood. Emotions, I think, always have to do with agitated forms of desire. Whenever you're in an emotional state, you have some sort of agitated desire. So, emotions are fairly special -- I am not always in some sort of emotional state or other, but I think I am always in some mood or other."

"Keep your innocence and ignorance aside, and expose yourself to dangerous situations, and understand the deeper secrets of life."

"I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straits and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind. I am confounded by the shining water and the size of the world."

"Normally we divide the external world into that which we consider to be good or valuable, bad or worthless, or neither. Most of the time these discriminations are incorrect or have little meaning. For example, our habitual way of categorizing people as friends, enemies, and strangers depending on how they make us feel is both incorrect and a great obstacle to developing impartial love for all living beings. Rather than holding so tightly to our discriminations of the external world, it would be much more beneficial if we learned to discriminate between valuable and worthless states of mind."

"Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation."

"As Lucretius says: 'Thus ever from himself doth each man flee.' But what does he gain if he does not escape from himself? He ever follows himself and weighs upon himself as his own most burdensome companion. And so we ought to understand that what we struggle with is the fault, not of the places, but of ourselves"

"remembering is a great invention of the mind, and if you try hard enough you can remember anything, whether it really happened or not."

"Thoughts do more. Words to much. Actions do much more."

"A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature."

"We move between two darknesses."

"A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn't conceive what it had never experienced"

". . . in seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker . . ."