Quote

The things we think about, brood on, dwell on, and exult over influence our life in a thousand ways. When we can actually choose the direction of our thoughts instead of just letting them run along the grooves of conditioned thinking, we become the masters of our own lives.

Eknath Easwaran

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Eknath Easwaran
Age: 88 †
Born: 1910
Born: December 17
Died: 1999
Died: October 26
Author
Philosopher
Translator
Keralam
Lives
Along
Brood
Running
Thoughts
Groove
Become
Choose
Conditioned
Way
Thousand
Dwell
Things
Instead
Mindfulness
Think
Influence
Letting
Thinking
Ways
Direction
Exult
Life
Actually
Masters
Grooves

More quotes by Eknath Easwaran

Image
A calm mind releases the most precious capacity a human being can have: the capacity to turn anger into compassion, fear into fearlessness, and hatred into love.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
Don't think the purpose of meditation is to go deep into consciousness, wrap a blanket around yourself, and say, 'How cozy! I'm going to curl up in here by myself let the world burn.' Not at all. We go deep into meditation so that we can reach out further and further to the world outside.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
When we are at home with ourselves, we are at home everywhere in the world. When we have found peace within ourselves, peace and love follow us wherever we go.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
The Sufis advise us to speak only after our words have managed to pass through three gates. At the first gate, we ask ourselves, 'Are these words true?' If so, we let them pass on if not, back they go. At the second gate, we ask, 'Are the necessary?' At the last gate, we ask, 'Are they kind?'
Eknath Easwaran
Image
An unhurried mind brings the capacity to make wise choices every day - choices of how we use our time, of where we place our resources and our love. I am not just talking about avoiding the rat race, but about a life full of an artistic beauty - a life that has almost vanished from modern civilization, but is quite within the reach of everyone.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
When we try to get ourselves out of the way, we can understand much better the needs of the people closest to us.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
As meditation deepens, compulsions, cravings and fits of emotion begin to lose their power to dictate our behavior. We see clearly that choices are possible we can say yes or we can say no. It is profoundly liberating.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
Every angry thought makes it a little easier to get angry the next time, and a little more likely.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
Having come to realize in the first stage of meditation that we are not our bodies, in the second stage we make an even more astounding discovery we are not our minds either.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
Every human heart has a deep need to love - to be in love, really, with all of life. This is the kind of love that comes when the mind is still. . . . Be still and know that we are all God’s children then you will be in love with all.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
Whatever we have done, we can always make amends for it without ever looking back in guilt or sorrow.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
Today, everything I do from morning meditation on - eating breakfast, going for a walk, writing, reading, even recreation - is governed by one purpose only: how to give the very best account of my life that I can in the service of all.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
When we meditate every morning we are putting on armor for the day's battle against our own impatience, inadequacy, resentment, and hostility.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
Meditation is warm-up exercise for the mind, so that you can jog through the rest of the day without getting agitated or spraining your patience.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
Nothing really worth having comes quickly and easily. If it did, I doubt that we would ever grow.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
International war is the sum total of millions of individual wars, raging in the minds of the people, between what is selfish and what is selfless. To the extent that you and I develop selflessness in our own hearts, to that extent we contribute to peace in our family, community, country, and world.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny private, shell-bound realm - which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
Do not feed your ego and your problems with your attention. ...Slowly, surely, the ego will lose weight, until one fine day it will be nothing but a thin ghost of its former self. You will be able to see right through it, to the divine presence that shines in each of us.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
God made the senses turn outwards, man therefore looks outwards, not into himself. But occasionally a daring soul, desiring immortality, has looked back and found himself.
Eknath Easwaran
Image
It may sound paradoxical, but however tight our schedule, however many things clamor to be done, we don't need to hurry. If we can keep our mind calm and go about our business with undivided attention, we will not only accomplish more but we'll do a better job - and find ourselves more patient, more at peace.
Eknath Easwaran