Meditated Quotes & Sayings

I started practicing Yoga at about 18. I had a friend who was doing it and was incredibly disciplined and meditated all the time. — Christy Turlington

I've never meditated for a moment in my life. I don't know how it works. But one of the things you have to do to put yourself in the meditating mode is stop narrating yourself to yourself. — Aleksandar Hemon

If I always appear prepared, it is because before entering an undertaking, I have meditated long and have foreseen what might occur. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly and secretly what I should do in circumstances unexpected by others; it is thought and preparation — Napoleon Bonaparte

Thomas Merton writes that if we have meditated on the events of the Passion but have not meditated on Dachau and Auschwitz, our perception of God at work in present times is incomplete. — Richard J. Foster

Nothing touches the soul but leaves its impress, and thus, little by little, we are fashioned into the image of all we have seen and heard, known and meditated; and if we learn to live with all that is fairest and purest and best , the love of it all will in the end become our life. — David B. Haight

Almost all the people who lived in Atlantis meditated and had powerful psychic skills. — Frederick Lenz

No book in the world deserves to be so unceasingly studied, and so profoundly meditated upon as the Bible. — John Quincy Adams

Sir William meditated. "Do you recall the name of the saint who was a regular rip before he got religion?" he asked. "I think that applies to most of them," said Fosdike. — Edward J. O'Brien

When phenomena are individually analyzed as selfless, and what has been analyzed is meditated upon, that is the cause for attaining the fruit, nirvana. One does not go to peace through any other cause — Gautama Buddha

To what a degree this loose mode of classing and denominating objects has rendered the vocabulary of mental and moral philosophy unfit for the purposes of accurate thinking, is best known to whoever has most meditated on the present condition of those branches of knowledge. — John Stuart Mill

I meditated before I hosted the Oscars, I meditate before I go on stage, I meditate in the morning and lunchtime when I'm on a film set. — Hugh Jackman

He meditated on the the use to which he should devote that power of youth which is granted to man only once
in a lifetime: that force which gives man a power of making himself, or even as it seemed to him - of making the universe
into anything he wishes. — Leo Tolstoy

I meditated on love and reasoned it out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with? ... They fall in love with a woman. They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder it is so miserable? Do you know how men should love? A tree. A rock. A cloud. — Carson McCullers

Fatal North was being poisoned to death aboard his own vessel and by someone from his hand-picked crew ... a cold-blooded, calculating, pre-meditated murder by a diabolical killer. — Bruce Henderson

When I missed the physical body of my partner, I meditated on its parts, tossed by the waves, torn, dispersed, and deteriorated. When memories of our lives together became acute and intense, I breathed. I breathed through each wave of yearning, of regret, of guilt, of what-could-have-been. Every time I asked him, "Where are you?" A quiet voice immediately responded, "I am here. I have never left you." I did not only lose a partner. I lost my childhood all over again. I lost my soul mate. I lost the accepting father and the gentle mother that he was to me. I lost the dream of a "normal life," which I had tried so hard to achieve. Now I had to face my own mind. — Dang Nghiem

Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn. — Victor Hugo

Prayer doesn't work because someone out there is listening, it works because someone in here is listening. I've paid attention. I've pictured what I want to happen in my life. I've meditated extensively on my family, my future, my past actions and what did and didn't work for me about them. — Adam Savage

He said that while Clemence adored the sacrament, he meditated on how it could be possible that humans had evolved out of apes only to sit gaping at a round white cracker. — Louise Erdrich

We would be a few years younger,if every day we meditated for five minutes on the meanings of the word innocence. — Alexandra Vasiliu

The adam and I had pondered the death many times since the day he brought me here. But despite our musing about an end of life and our search for evidence of death among fallen and decomposing fruit and the compost of leaves and the refuse of our industry, which we gathered to enrich the soil, I understood the death less well than the explosion that had filled the universe at its incarnation. In fact, every evidence of degrading life seemed only to point back to the sustenance of the living so that I grasped the idea of the death less and less the more I meditated upon it. — Tosca Lee

Indeed, what more could you want? A little garden to amble about in, and infinite space to dream in. At his feet, whatever could be grown and gathered; over his head, whatever could be studied and meditated upon; a few flowers on the ground and all the stars in the sky. — Victor Hugo

When the meal was over we all had a quiet rest in our rooms and I meditated on the race. This is the time when an athlete feels all alone in the big world. Opponents assume tremendous stature. Any runner who denies having fears, nerves or some kind of disposition is a bad athlete, or a liar. — Gordon Pirie

I must thank you for it all. I might not have gone but for you, and so have missed the finest study I ever came across: a study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon. There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it. And now for lunch, and then for Norman Neruda. Her attack and her bowing are splendid. What's that little thing of Chopin's she plays so magnificently: Tra-la-la-lira-lira-lay. Leaning back in the cab, this amateur bloodhound carolled away like a lark while I meditated upon the many-sidedness of the human mind. — Arthur Conan Doyle

It is often thought that the Buddha's doctrine teaches us that suffering will disappear if one has meditated long enough, or if one sees everything differently. It is not that at all. Suffering isn't going to go away; the one who suffers is going to go away. — Ayya Khema

If somebody plans to carry out a series of murders ... then this is obviously an evil and pre-meditated attack and in that case, there could be a deterrent effect. — David Davis

In his lecture on Jesus, Brown meditated on the unlikely paradox that any institution could represent this man because institutions, by their very nature, have to follow particular laws if they are to survive and prosper; and the main law of institutional survival is that the many take precedence over the few. If institutions are to endure they have to place a higher value on their own endurance than on loyalty to individuals, no matter how attractive or charismatic they may be. — Richard Holloway

Someone once inquired of a Far Eastern Zen master, who had a great serenity and peace about him no matter what pressures he faced, "How do you maintain that serenity and peace?" He replied, "I never leave my place of meditation." He meditated early in the morning and for the rest of the day, he carried the peace of those moments with him in his mind and heart. — Stephen Covey

During the summer I meditated outside in nature. Listening to the wind with the ears are like listening to mere noise, but listening to the wind blowing through the trees from the inner silence and being one with the wind is like listening to the celestial music. — Swami Dhyan Giten

From the beginning of his time until the end, Bonhoeffer maintained the daily discipline of scriptural meditation and prayer he had been practicing for more than a decade. Each morning he meditated for at least half an hour on a verse of Scripture. And he interceded for his friends and relatives, and for his brothers in the Confessing Church who were on the front lines or in concentration camps. — Eric Metaxas

I thought about evolutionary historians who argued that walking was a central part of what it meant to be human. Our two-legged motion was what first differentiated us from the apes. It freed our hands for tools and carried us onthe long marches out of Africa. As a species, we colonized the world on foot. Most of human history was created through contacts conducted at walking pace, even when some rode horses. I thought of the pilgrimages to Compostela in Spain; to Mecca; to the source of the Ganges; and of wandering dervishes, sadhus; and friars who approached God on foot. The Buddha meditated by walking and Wordsworth composed sonnets while striding beside the lakes.
Bruce Chatwin concluded from all this that we would think and live better and be closer to our purpose as humans if we moved continually on foot across the surface of the earth. I was not sure I was living or thinking any better. — Rory Stewart

Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race. — Victor Hugo

The gulf between their world and hers had manifested itself, however much they'd meditated on how to ball her, and remained. — Philip K. Dick

I meditated upon it and found myself to be a riddle — Hermann Hesse

Paul Otremba's remarkable first book, The Currency, is an intriguing foray into lyric epistemology that tries to come to ter ms with the implacable, paradox-ridden nature of knowledge and experience. These are deeply felt, deeply meditated poems guided by a sensibility highly attenuated to the physical world. In their openness to friendship and love and in their fearless directness, they remind me of the work of Larry Levis and Jon Anderson. Like Levis and Anderson, Otremba promises to be an influential and important voice for his generation. — Michael Collier

Whether you've never meditated before or you've been doing it religiously for years, it is always good to evaluate (or re-evaluate) your practice. Although I've been meditating and teaching it for years, I still enjoy reading new information about it, learning new techniques, and checking out new meditation recordings. There is always something to learn because there are as many ways to meditate as there are people who are doing it. — Liberty Forrest

Julian sincerely abhorred the system of oriental despotism which Diocletian, Constantine, and the patient habits of four score years, had established in the empire. A motive of superstition prevented the execution of the design which Julian had frequently meditated, of relieving his head from the weight of a costly diadem; but he absolutely refused the title of Dominus or Lord, a word which was grown so familiar to the ears of the Romans, that they no longer remembered its servile and humiliating origin. — Edward Gibbon

If the world does not shine brightly, even just the physical, sensual perception after meditation, you have not meditated. You have sat and thought of things that were not real. — Frederick Lenz

The spirit of the music and the energy that kicks back from the fans inspires me. To stay centered amidst the chaos I meditate. I first meditated at age 17 and have continued off and on through the years. — Paul Rodgers

Bhrigu meditated and found that food is Spirit. From food all things are born, by food they live, towards food they move, into food they return. — Shree Purohit Swami

The third one is culturing the mind. One who has never meditated has no right to even touch the book of Ashtavakra. — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

When I was eight, a hippie guy taught me how to meditate and gave me this scarf I was supposed to wear when I meditated. I still have it; it's probably one of the items that mean most to me. — Sam Taylor-Johnson

I'm not a New Age person, but I do believe in meditation, and for that reason I've always liked the Buddhist religion. When I've been to Japan, I've been to Buddhist temples and meditated, and I found that rewarding. — Clint Eastwood

...I meditated on the passage of time, and how it may be found in both a dry and a wet or gaseous state; how, though lush, it might be dessicated for storage. — M T Anderson

Much later that night, as he meditated in forgiveness of the day, he wondered at himself. Had not he laughed at cruelty, had not his smile condoned the degradation of another human being? Where was Sa in that? Guilt washed over him. He forced it aside; a true priest of Sa had little use for guilt. It but obscured; if something made a man feel bad then he must determine what about it troubled him, and eliminate that. Simply to suffer the discomforts of guilt did not indicate a man had improved himself, only that he suspected he harbored a fault. He lay still in the darkness and pondered what had made him smile and why. And for the first time in many years, he wondered if his conscience was not too tender, if it had not become a barrier between him and his fellows. "That which separates is not of Sa," he said softly to himself. But he fell asleep before he could remember the source for the quote, or even it if were from scripture at all.
p. 313 — Robin Hobb

I meditated on the nature of friendship as I practiced the craft. My friends had always come from outside the mainstream. I had always been popular with the fifth column of my peers, those individuals who were princely in their solitude, lords of their own unpraised melancholy. Distrusting the approval of the chosen, I would take the applause of exiles anytime. My friends were all foreigners, and they wore their unbelongingness in their eyes. I hunted for that look; I saw it often, disarrayed and fragmentary and furious, and I approached every boy who invited me in. — Pat Conroy

What moments of despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated. — George Eliot

A study funded by the National Institutes of Health showed a 23 percent decrease in mortality in people who meditated versus those who did not, — Arianna Huffington

Vader completed his meditation and opened his eyes. His pale, flame-savaged face stared back at him from out of the reflective black transparisteel of his pressurized meditation chamber. Without the neural connection to his armor, he was conscious of the stumps of his legs, the ruin of his arms, the perpetual pain in his flesh. He welcomed it. Pain fed his hate, and hate fed his strength. Once, as a Jedi, he had meditated to find peace. Now he meditated to sharpen the edges of his anger. — Paul S. Kemp

We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that's death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn't have any fresh air. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience. — Pema Chodron

Bruce ate a mouthful of eggs and meditated. 'I wonder how many of the great heroes of history would turn out to be a slow runner, if you ever investigated the circumstances. — Barbara Michaels

She has never listened to Deepak Chopra, switched to almond milk, or meditated. Yet she is here, in the chair by the window in the house she was born in, outliving her husband and siblings and nephews and friends. — Lena Dunham

For an act may be wrong judged purely by itself, but when the motive that prompted the act is understood, it is construed differently. I lay it down as an axiom, that only that is criminal in the sight of God where crime is meditated. — Elizabeth Keckley

It was so interesting, when [John Coltrane] created A Love Supreme. He had meditated that week. I almost didn't see him downstairs. And it was so quiet! There was no sound, no practice! He was up there meditating, and when he came down he said, "I have a whole new music!" He said, "There is a new recording that I will do, I have it all, everything." And it was so beautiful! He was like Moses coming down from the mountain. And when he recorded it, he knew everything, everything. He said this was the first time that he had all the music in his head at once to record. — Alice Coltrane

All who have meditated upon the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depend upon the education of youth. — Aristotle.

Hacked to pieces by a band of hillbilly satanists" hadn't ever made my list of imagined ways of getting rubbed out - and as the Samurai warriors of yore meditated on a thousand demises, I too had imagined a whole lot of ways of kicking. Helios Augustus's candle flame flickered in the black opening. He — Laird Barron

In my imagination, the Editor meditated in a mountain-cave, espoused the rules of grammar, and frowned upon speculative fiction. — Josh Malerman

Ever since his first ecstasy or vision of Christminster and its possibilities, Jude had meditated much and curiously on the probable sort of process that was involved in turning the expressions of one language into those of another. He concluded that a grammar of the required tongue would contain, primarily, a rule, prescription, or clue of the nature of a secret cipher, which, once known, would enable him, by merely applying it, to change at will all words of his own speech into those of the foreign one. His childish idea was, in fact, a pushing to the extremity of mathematical precision what is everywhere known as Grimm's Law - an aggrandizement of rough rules to ideal completeness. Thus he assumed that the words of the required language were always to be found somewhere latent in the words of the given language by those who had the art to uncover them, such art being furnished by the books aforesaid. — Thomas Hardy

The Buddha would never speak about enlightenment. The way he taught people about enlightenment was they meditated with him. He exposed them to countless views of the nagual. — Frederick Lenz

I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness. — Pico Iyer

When you are meditating, after you've meditated on the yantra or candle flame, simply try feeling gratitude. Sit and feel grateful to existence because you are meditating. — Frederick Lenz

She meditated upon a lie. This is the essence of temptation. — Jim Berg

The Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution. — Michel Houellebecq

Some people meditated. Some people ran laps around a track. When I was tense, I turned yarn into socks. Lots of socks. More socks than any sane woman with the standard-issue pair of feet could possibly use in a lifetime. — Barbara Bretton

With each choice that you make to align yourself with the energy of your soul, you empower yourself. Authentic power is built up step by step, choice by choice. It cannot be meditated or prayed into being. It must be earned. — Gary Zukav

The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event. — Edward Gibbon

Pascal meditated upon outer space, but we need only turn our thoughts inward to feel his dread. Inside every one of our skulls lies an organ so vast in its complexity that it might as well be infinite. — Sebastian Seung

Leave it to the Indians to have meditated upon and figured out the laws of the Universe. Leave it to the Americans to either change those laws, have us escape into another Universe with different laws, or create that other Universe if it doesn't exist already ! — Gaurav Dagaonkar

Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human soul, and the summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman. — George Berkeley

The eyes of all our countrymen are now upon us, and we shall have their blessings and praises, if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the tyranny meditated against them. — George Washington

They had no fear of death, and whoever has no fear of death - the centurion had often meditated on this here in the East - whoever has no fear of death is immortal. — Nikos Kazantzakis

Pilgrimages are journeys to places of power. People sometimes make pilgrimages to the caves where Milarepa or other great yogis meditated. — Frederick Lenz

You should always feel, no matter how many times you've meditated before, that this is your first meditation. You have no idea what will happen or what won't happen. — Frederick Lenz

By inner experience I understand that which one usually calls mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least of meditated emotion. But I am thinking less of confessional experience, to which one has had to adhere up to now, that of an experience laid bare, free of ties, even of an origin, of any confession whatever. This is why I don't like the word mystical. — Georges Bataille

Meditation helps concentration of the mind. Then the mind is free from thoughts and is in the meditated form. — Ramana Maharshi

I'm a lapsed Zen Buddhist. I've read hundreds of books on Zen, I meditated daily for about fifteen years, and once spent a month studying with Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh. — Will McIntosh

Put your vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox, and don't make any conscious effort to improve it... One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your shot ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of pre-meditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed. Make yourself a solemn promise right now that you'll never use 'emolument' when you mean 'tip' and you'll never say 'John stopped long enough to perform an act of excretion' when you mean 'John stopped long enough to take a shit'. If you believe 'take a shit' would be considered offensive or inappropriate by your audience, feel free to say 'John stopped long enough to move his bowels'... — Stephen King

I meditated on my own for some time, read spiritual books, became a vegetarian and had incredible experiences every day, every meditation, where I was just thrown into the infinite - never realizing that other people didn't necessarily have those experiences in meditation that quickly. — Frederick Lenz

When you drive, you are doing several things at once. You are using your eyes, ears, hands, your mind. If you have meditated for many years and have reached a lofty height in your meditation, as I have, you can meditate while running and cycling and painting. — Sri Chinmoy

My own way of writing is very meditated and, despite my reputation, rather slow-moving. So I do spend a good deal of time contemplating endings. The final ending is usually arrived at simply by intuition. — Joyce Carol Oates

[On scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss]
[Carl Friedrich] Gauss told his friend Rudolf Wagner, a professor of biology at Gottingen University, that he did not believe in the Bible but that he had meditated a great deal on the future of the human soul and speculated on the possibility of the soul being reincarnated on another planet. Evidently, Gauss was a Deist with a good deal of skepticism concerning religion. — Gerhard Falk

People who are capable of practicing tantra are individuals who have meditated for many, many years and developed very strong and powerful states of attention. — Frederick Lenz

There is a Zen story (very funny - ha-ha) about a monk who, having failed to achieve "enlightenment" (brain-change) through the normal Zen methods, was told by his teacher to think of nothing but an ox. Day after day after day, the monk thought of the ox, visualized the ox, meditated on the ox. Finally, one day, the teacher came to the monk's cell and said, "Come out here - I want to talk to you." "I can't get out," the monk said. "My horns won't fit through the door." I can't get out . . . At these words, the monk was "enlightened." Never mind what "enlightenment" means, right now. The monk went through some species of brain change, obviously. He had developed the delusion that he was an ox, and awakening from that hypnoidal state he saw through the mechanism of all other delusions and how they robotize us. EXERCIZES — Robert Anton Wilson

As my meditative experiences grew, I had wonderful relationships. I met the most wonderful women, who meditated and shared certain understandings that I had. — Frederick Lenz

Jessica ... The sound of his voice saying my name soothed me, and it's all I wanted to hear him say. Just my name, over and over and over again in his buttery baritone. I wanted my name to be his mantra, the word he meditated on, his tool for finding calm in the world.
But he kept on talking. — Megan McCafferty

Chemotherapy and radiotherapy will make the ancient method of drilling holes in a patient's head to permit the escape of demons look relatively advanced ... Toxic chemotherapy is a hoax. The doctors who use it are guilty of pre-meditated murder, and the use of cobalt and other methods of cancer treatment popular today effectively closes the door on cure. — Ernst T. Krebs

Strive when your meditation is ended to retain the thoughts and resolutions you have made as your earnest practice throughout the day. This is the real fruit of meditation, without which it is apt to be unprofitable, if not actually harmful - inasmuch as to dwell upon virtues without practising them lends to puff us up with unrealities, until we begin to fancy ourselves all that we have meditated upon and resolved to be; which is all very well if our resolutions are earnest and substantial, but on the contrary hollow and dangerous if they are not put in practice. — Francis De Sales

In horror of death, I took to the mountains - again and again I meditated on the uncertainty of the hour of death, capturing the fortress of the deathless unending nature of mind. Now all fear of death is over and done. — Milarepa

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive. — David Foster Wallace

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth. — Aristotle.

I was about to meditate like no one had ever meditated before. — Devon Monk