50 Breathing Quotes For Inspiration

In our fast-paced world, finding moments of stillness can be challenging. Yet, the simple act of breathing deeply can bring clarity, calm, and a sense of rejuvenation. Taking a moment to breathe can sometimes feel revolutionary, breaking through the clutter of our daily lives. To inspire you, we have curated a collection of the top 50 breathing quotes. These words of wisdom from philosophers, poets, and thinkers remind us of the importance of breath and the profound impact it can have on our mental and emotional well-being. Dive in and let these quotes inspire you to take a deep breath and savor the present moment.

1. “From The Twelve EnlightenmentsObserve your own body. It breathes. You breathe when you are asleep, when you are no longer conscious of your own ideas of self-identity. Who, then, is breathing? The collection of information that you mistakenly think it’s you is not the main protagonist in this drama called the breath. In fact, you are not breathing; breath is naturally happening to you. You can purposely end your own life, but you cannot purposely keep your own life going. The expression, “My life” is actually an oxymoron, a result of ignorance and mistaken assumption. You don’t posses life; life expresses itself through you. Your body is a flower that life let bloom, a phenomenon created by life.” - Ilchi Lee

2. “There is a saying in the Neverland that,every time you breathe, a grown-up dies.” - J.M. Barrie

3. “Oh no. Don't smile. You'll kill me. I stop breathing when you smile.” - Tessa Dare

4. “Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.” - Thich Nhat Hang

5. “We too should make ourselves empty, that the great soul of the universe may fill us with its breath.” - Lawrence Binyon

6. “How do you tell if something's alive? You check for breathing.” - Markus Zusak

7. “I do my job like I breathe — so if I can’t breathe I’m in trouble.” - Karl Lagerfeld

8. “He was a heavy breather. You could hear him puffing and blowing into the mike up there like some large and sweaty animal. I don't like that, never have. My father is like that on the telephone. A lot of heavy breathing in your ear, so you can almost smell the scotch and Pall Malls on his breath. It always seems unsanitary and somehow homosexual.” - Richard Bachman

9. “Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury. It was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.” - Edith Wharton

10. “If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.” - Amit Ray

11. “It is a common belief that we breathe with our lungs alone, but in point of fact, the work of breathing is done by the whole body. The lungs play a passive role in the respiratory process. Their expansion is produced by an enlargement, mostly downward, of the thoracic cavity and they collapse when that cavity is reduced. Proper breathing involves the muscles of the head, neck, thorax, and abdomen. It can be shown that chronic tension in any part of the body's musculature interferes with the natural respiratory movements.Breathing is a rhythmic activity. Normally a person at rest makes approximately 16 to 17 respiratory incursions a minute. The rate is higher in infants and in states of excitation. It is lower in sleep and in depressed persons. The depth of the respiratory wave is another factor which varies with emotional states. Breathing becomes shallow when we are frightened or anxious. It deepens with relaxation, pleasure and sleep. But above all, it is the quality of the respiratory movements that determines whether breathing is pleasurable or not. With each breath a wave can be seen to ascend and descend through the body. The inspiratory wave begins deep in the abdomen with a backward movement of the pelvis. This allows the belly to expand outward. The wave then moves upward as the rest of the body expands. The head moves very slightly forward to suck in the air while the nostrils dilate or the mouth opens. The expiratory wave begins in the upper part of the body and moves downward: the head drops back, the chest and abdomen collapse, and the pelvis rocks forward.Breathing easily and fully is one of the basic pleasures of being alive. The pleasure is clearly experienced at the end of expiration when the descending wave fills the pelvis with a delicious sensation. In adults this sensation has a sexual quality, though it does not induce any genital feeling. The slight backward and forward movements of the pelvis, similar to the sexual movements, add to the pleasure. Though the rhythm of breathing is pronounced in the pelvic area, it is at the same time experienced by the total body as a feeling of fluidity, softness, lightness and excitement.The importance of breathing need hardly be stressed. It provides the oxygen for the metabolic processes; literally it supports the fires of life. But breath as "pneuma" is also the spirit or soul. We live in an ocean of air like fish in a body of water. By our breathing we are attuned to our atmosphere. If we inhibit our breathing we isolate ourselves from the medium in which we exist. In all Oriental and mystic philosophies, the breath holds the secret to the highest bliss. That is why breathing is the dominant factor in the practice of Yoga.” - Alexander Lowen

12. “Yes, they are elves," Legolas said. "and they say that you breathe so loud they could shoot you in the dark." Sam hastily covered his mouth.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

13. “Divide the constant tide and random noisiness of energetic flow, with conscious recurring moments of empty mind, solitude, gratitude and deep...slow...breathing. Of this, the natural law of self-preservation demands.” - T.F. Hodge

14. “We sleep, allowing gravity to hold us, allowing Earth- our larger body- to recalibrate our neurons, composting the keen encounters of our waking hours (the tensions and terrors of our individual days), stirring them back, as dreams, into the sleeping substance of our muscles. We give ourselves over to the influence of the breathing earth. Sleep is the shadow of the earth as it seeps into our skin and spreads throughout our limbs, dissolving our individual will into the thousand and one selves that compose it- cells, tissues, and organs taking their prime directives now from gravity and the wind- as residual bits of sunlight, caught in the long tangle of nerves, wander the drifting landscape of our earth-borne bodies like deer moving across the forested valleys.” - David Abram

15. “Breathing involves a continual oscillation between exhaling and inhaling, offering ourselves to the world at one moment and drawing the world into ourselves at the next...” - David Abram

16. “Breathing, nYou had asthma as a child, had to carry around an inhaler. But when you grew older, it went away. You could run for miles and it was fine. Sometimes I worry that this is happening to me in reverse. The older I get, the more I lose my ability to breathe.” - David Levithan

17. “It's decidedly bizzare, when the Worst Thing hppens and you find yourself still conscious, still breathing.” - Elisa Albert

18. “and I wonder if Beethoven held his breaththe first time his fingers touched the keysthe same way a soldier holds his breaththe first time his finger clicks the trigger.We all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.” - Andrea Gibson

19. “I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and harbor seal and blacktail deer. I breathe in the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds, the same particles of air that rushed over the sea in storms, whirled in high mountain snows, whistled across the poles, and whispered through lush equatorial gardens…air that has passed continually through life on earth. I breathe it in, pass it on, share it in equal measure with billions of other living things, endlessly, infinitely.” - Richard Nelson

20. “How to be a Poet (to remind myself)iMake a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity… iiBreathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. iiiAccept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.” - Wendell Berry

21. “oxygen Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even, while it calls the earth its home, the soul. So the merciful, noisy machine stands in our house working away in its lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel before the fire, stirring with a stick of iron, letting the logs lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room, are in your usual position, leaning on your right shoulder which aches all day. You are breathing patiently; it is a beautiful sound. It is your life, which is so close to my own that I would not know where to drop the knife of separation. And what does this have to do with love, except everything? Now the fire rises and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red roses of flame. Then it settles to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift: our purest, sweet necessity: the air.” - Mary Oliver

22. “At this moment, you are seamlessly flowing with the cosmos. There is no difference between your breathing and the breathing of the rain forest, between your bloodstream and the world’s rivers, between your bones and the chalk cliffs of Dover.” - Deepak Chopra

23. “I am never alone wherever I am. The air itself supplies me with a century of love. When I breathe in, I am breathing in the laughter, tears, victories, passions, thoughts, memories, existence, joys, moments, and the hues of the sunlight on many tones of skin; I am breathing in the same air that was exhaled by many before me. The air that bore them life. And so how can I ever say that I am alone?” - C. JoyBell C.

24. “He hands the page to his wife and looks across the room to Colleen's picture, listening to her absence, breathing deeply the air she can't share.” - Steven Herrick

25. “Reading is an addiction, much like living and breathing is an addiction.” - Jeffrey Michael

26. “I'd stopped breathing and everything about that moment was like stumbling into a 3-D movie after living a 2-D life.” - Karen Tayleur

27. “Oh! Did you hear that Haley Spencer asked him to homecoming?” she exclaimed. “Of course I didn’t. You’re my source of gossip, remember?” - Rebecca Donovan

28. “These past two days, I’ve seen a fire in your eyes that I never have before. Granted, it’s mostly anger and frustration, but it’s still emotion.” - Rebecca Donovan

29. “He leaned toward me and delicately grazed my lips with his. The tease left me breathless, burning for more. “I keep having to remind myself that I can do that,” he smirked.” - Rebecca Donovan

30. “Knowing you were right down the hall was way too hard. I couldn’t do it,” Evan declared, sliding under the covers next to me.” - Rebecca Donovan

31. “I knew in that moment, I would never love anyone in my life the way I loved Evan Mathews.” - Rebecca Donovan

32. “You are not showing her my baby pictures!” He sounded horrified, which made me laugh. “Come on, Evan,” I teased with a laughing smile, “you were adorable.” - Rebecca Donovan

33. “Do You think it matters if they're tiny or deep? he asked. Well, if they're not tiny breaths and they're not deep breaths, then they're just ... breaths. Then you're just breathing for the sake of ... breathing. ... Seize them. Feel them. Love them ...” - K.A. Tucker

34. “I had to accept the fact that bad things happen. It’s out of our control and I know it hurts like hell but you learn to move on. Yes, the pain never fades and it’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do but eventually you learn to breathe again.” - Joanne McClean

35. “True writers know that writing is not something they feel required to do,or to make a living they must do, it is quite frankly like breathing. Somecan breathe often and fluently, some short breaths, some a long exhaleand for many of us it is the patient steady breathing surrounding life.” - Milissa R. Bailey

36. “All she wanted was a breathing space in which to hurt.” - Margaret Mitchell

37. “Is the mask working?" she asked me."How can I tell?""If you can breath, then it's working.” - Lemony Snicket

38. “Someday, it will be hard to remember why we were once so fired up about 3G connectivity and the wonders of mobile broadband. Seamless, lightning-fast connectedness will be a given everywhere on Earth, and today's gadgets will be quaint museum pieces. At that point, all we'll care about is what kind of life these devices have created for us. And if it isn't a good life, we'll wonder what we did wrong.” - William_Powers

39. “We're always on breath away from something--living or dying--, sometimes it just can't be helped.” - Heather Gudenkauf

40. “We're always one breath away from something, living or dying, sometimes it just can't be helped.” - Heather Gudenkauf

41. “I saw to the south a man walking. He was breaking ground in perfect silence. He wore a harness and pulled a plow. His feet trod his figure's blue shadow, and the plow cut a long blue shadow in the field. He turned back as if to check the furrow, or as if he heard a call. Again I saw another man on the plain to the north. This man walked slowly with a spade, and turned the green ground under. Then before me in the near distance I saw the earth itself walking, the earth walking dark and aerated as it always does in every season, peeling the light back: The earth was plowing the men under, and the space, and the plow. No one sees us go under. No one sees generations churn, or civilizations. The green fields grow up forgetting. Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don't fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat's stem slits the crest of the present.” - Annie Dillard

42. “Rather than allowing our response to an even affect our breathing, we can learn instead to let our breathing change our relationship to the event.” - Cyndi Lee

43. “I could not give up either of these worlds, neither the book I am holding nor the gleaming forest, though I have told you almost nothing of what is said here on these grim pages, from the sentences of which I’ve conjured images of a bleak site years ago. Here in this room, I suppose, is to be found the interior world of the book; but it opens upon a world beyond the windows, where no event has been collapsed into syntax, where the vocabulary, it seems, is infinite. The indispensable connection for me lies with the open space (of the open window ajar year round, never closed) that lets the breath of every winter storm, the ripping wind and its pelting rain, enter the room.” - Barry Lopez

44. “When you want wisdom and insight as badly as you want to breathe, it is then you shall have it.” - Socrates

45. “I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.” - Joan Didion

46. “I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and filled myself up with the breeze from the valley. Then I let it out slow so it could get back to its travels, with a little bit of me added to it.” - Katherine Hannigan

47. “What destiny is there, but to sense, observe, merge, re-emerge,Empty, yet filled, spreading everywhere, inside, outside, in, Pulsing, fluctuating, breathing as part of one being, Whispering, feeling, reflecting, flowing between hot and cold, Mineral and plant, dark and light, love and fear, new and old.” - jay woodman

48. “The reflection, the verisimilitude, of life that shines in the fleshly cells from the soul source is the only cause of man's attachment to his body; obviously he would not pay solicitous homage to a clod of clay. A human being falsely identifies himself with his physical form because the life currents from the soul are breath-conveyed into the flesh with such intense power that man mistakes the effect for a cause, and idolatrously imagines the body to have life of its own.” - Paramahansa Yogananda

49. “Keep breathing," said Ben. "That's the big thing for now."--"Money Talks” - Kurt Vonnegut

50. “The savage rushing of the river seemed to be inside her head, inside her body. Even when the oarswomen, their guides, were speaking to her, she had the impression she couldn't quite hear them because of the roar. Not of the river that did indeed roar, just behind them, close to the simple shelter they'd made for her, but because of an internal roar as of the sound of a massive accumulation of words, spoken all at once, but collected over a lifetime, now trying to leave her body. As they rose to her lips, and in response to the question: Do you want to go home? she leaned over a patch of yellow grass near her elbow and threw up. All the words from decades of her life filled her throat. Words she had said or had imagined saying or had swallowed before saying to her father, dead these many years. All the words to her mother. To her husbands. Children. Lovers. The words shouted back at the television set, spreading its virus of mental confusion. Once begun, the retching went on and on. She would stop, gasping for breath, rest a minute, and be off again. Draining her body of precious fluid... Soon, exhausted, she was done. No, she had said weakly, I don't want to go home. I'll be all right now.” - Alice Walker