50 Mindfulness Quotes

In today's fast-paced world, finding moments of peace and clarity is more important than ever. Mindfulness, the practice of being fully present and engaged in the moment, offers a pathway to reduce stress, increase self-awareness, and enhance overall well-being. To inspire and guide you on your journey towards mindfulness, we've curated a collection of the top 50 mindfulness quotes. Each quote encapsulates powerful wisdom and insight, providing you with a source of reflection and motivation. Dive in, and let these words help you cultivate a more mindful and fulfilling life.

1. “Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

2. “I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.” - G.K. Chesterton

3. “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” - Plutarch

4. “The mind can never be satisfied.” - Wallace Stevens

5. “Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead.” - James Joyce

6. “Athletes need to enjoy their training. They don't enjoy going down to the track with a coach making them do repetitions until they're exhausted. From enjoyment comes the will to win.” - Arthur Lydiard

7. “Preston, I don't think this creature could ever find its way into your head. Quite apart from anything else, it seems pretty crowded and complicated to me.” - Terry Pratchett

8. “Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality-call it an alternate reality-to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.” - Haruki Murakami

9. “The mind creates those things that exist.” - Terry Tempest Williams

10. “There are some things your mind has been hiding from you.” - Obert Skye

11. “We tend to be preoccupied by our problems when we have a heightened sense of vulnerability and a diminished sense of power. Today, see each problem as an invitation to prayer.” - John Ortberg

12. “It is the vocation of the Christian in every generation to out-think all opposition.” - Elton Trueblood

13. “It is true that the subliminal in man is the largest part of his nature and has in it the secret of the unseeen dynamisms which explain his surface activities. But the lower vital subconscious which is all that this psycho-analysis of Freud seems to know, - and of that it knows only a few ill-lit corners, - is no more than a restricted and very inferior portion of the subliminal whole... to begin by opening up the lower subconscious, risking to raise up all that is foul or obscure in it, is to go out of one's way to invite trouble.” - Sri Aurobindo

14. “As in all infant sciences, the universal habit of the human mind - to take a partial or local truth, generalise it unduly and try to explain a whole field of nature in its narrow terms - runs riot here (in psychoanalysis). Moreover, the exaggeration of the importance of suppressed sexual complexes is a dangerous falsehood.” - Sri Aurobindo

15. “Because fear kills everything," Mo had once told her. "Your mind, your heart, your imagination.” - Cornelia Funke

16. “The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes.” - W. Somerset Maugham

17. “Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer.” - Humphry Davy

18. “The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist one—remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.” - Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

19. “A veiled Mind is more enticing than all the nude men lining up the Seine, during Summer.” - AainaA-Ridtz A R

20. “. . . 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 . . .” - Charles Dickens

21. “The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.” - Michel de Montaigne

22. “Unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea.” - Samuel Beckett

23. “One word can change your life forever.I love youI hate youThink about it” - Alan Macmillan Orr

24. “It is grief that develops the powers of the mind.” - Marcel Proust

25. “It’s clear that if we use the mind attentively, mental power is increased, and if we concentrate the mind in the moment, it is easier to coordinate mind and body. But in terms of mind and body unity, is there something we can concentrate on that will reliably aid us in discovering this state of coordination? In Japan, and to some degree other Asian countries, people have historically focused mental strength in the hara (abdomen) as a way of realizing their full potential. Japan has traditionally viewed the hara as the vital center of humanity in a manner not dissimilar to the Western view of the heart or brain. I once read that years ago Japanese children were asked to point to the origin of thoughts and feelings. They inevitably pointed toward the abdominal region. When the same question was asked of American children, most pointed at their heads or hearts. Likewise, Japan and the West have commonly held differing views of what is physical power or physical health, with Japan emphasizing the strength of the waist and lower body and Western people admiring upper body power. (Consider the ideal of the sumo wrestler versus the V-shaped Western bodybuilder with a narrow waist and broad shoulders.)However, East and West also hold similar viewpoints regarding the hara, and we’re perhaps not as dissimilar as some might imagine. For instance, hara ga nai hito describes a cowardly person, “a person with no hara.” Sounds similar to our saying that so-and-so “has no guts,” doesn’t it?” - H.E. Davey

26. “I step back further, until I feel cold tiles against my back. It is then I get the glimmer that I associate with memory. As my mind tries to settle on it, it flutters away, like ashes caught in a breeze, and I realize that in my life there is a then, a before, though before what I cannot say, and there is a now, and there is nothing between the two but a long, silent emptiness that has led me here, to me and him, in this house.” - S.J. Watson

27. “A fully belly is little worth where the mind is starved.” - Mark Twain

28. “In a general sense, I admit to valuing the worldviews of men under the age of 40 and women over the age of 30.” - Criss Jami

29. “Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.” - Criss Jami

30. “You could achieve nothing with wondered mind! you need to stop it!” - Kunal Jajal

31. “It was really amazing the number of hard hits from which a mind could recover.” - Stephen King

32. “The mind is a powerful thing. It can take you through walls.” - Denis Avey

33. “We regard promissory materialism as superstition without a rational foundation. The more we discover about the brain, the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena, and the more wonderful do both the brain events and the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists . . . who often confuse their religion with their science.” - John C. Eccles

34. “The distinction between diseases of "brain" and "mind," between "neurological" problems and "psychological" or "psychiatric" ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between brain and mind. Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that affect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation, and so on; lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary problem.” - António R. Damásio

35. “Material things have closed boundaries; they are not accessible, cannot be penetrated, by things outside themselves. But one's existence as a spiritual being involves being and remaining oneself and at the same time admitting and transforming into oneself the reality of the world. No other material thing can be present in the space occupied by a house, a tree, or a fountain pen. But where there is mind, the totality of things has room; it is "possible that in a single being the comprehensiveness of the whole universe may dwell.” - Josef Pieper

36. “It turns out that the men who ultimately, who unpretentiously value peace are willing to sacrifice their own peace of mind in order to render it. The question is, 'Who, between opposing forces, would do such a thing?' It seems only theoretical albeit true that men who accept an objective rather than subjective moral standard are, in a general sense, more capable of making such sacrifices for the sake of peace.” - Criss Jami

37. “I'd seen glimpses of a different me. It was a different me because in those increments of time I thought I actually became a winner.The truth, however, is painful.It was a truth that told me with a scratching internal brutality that I was me, and that winning wan't natural for me. It had to be fought for, in the echoes and trodden footprints of my mind. In a way, I had to scavenge for moments of alrightness.” - Markus Zusak

38. “أصحاب العقول العظيمة لديهم أهداف وغايات، أما الآخرون فيكتفون بالأحلام.” - واشطن إرفنج

39. “As with stomachs, we should pity minds that do not eat.” - Victor Hugo

40. “The interpretation of Dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” - Sigmund Freud

41. “It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.” - René Descartes

42. “Open your mind to the infinite possibilities that exist for you; then create within your reality the things that you desire.” - Steven Redhead

43. “To resist the frigidity of old age, one must combine the body, the mind, and the heart. And to keep these in parallel vigor one must exercise, study, and love.” - Charles-Victor De Bonstettin

44. “The more words you know, the more clearly and powerfully you will think...and the more ideas you will invite into your mind.” - Wilfred Funk

45. “It is my opinion that the isolated mind loses its purchase on reality all too easily and becomes prone to fantasy.” - Frank Tallis

46. “I find it very difficult to talk here now because I'm watching the sea all the time. The sea always makes me watch it all the time. I've spent hours and hours not just on the sea but just watching wave after wave come in. If it's an image of anything, I think it's an image of our own unconscious, the unconscious of our own minds... or you can put it the other way around, and that is that we have a sea in us. After all, we are sea creatures that learnt to walk on the land, are we not? And perhaps one way or another we go back to it. Every night when we dream we go back into that kind of depths, and that kind of beauty and monstrosity and mystery. So really the sea is not a single image, it can really image almost anything that the human mind can discover.” - William Golding

47. “By the second day, the song lyrics had faded, but in their place came darker irritations. Gradually, I started to become aware of a young man sitting just behind me and to the left. I had noticed him when he first entered the mediation hall, and had felt a flash of annoyance at the time: something about him, especially his beard, had struck me as too calculatedly dishevelled, as if he were trying to make a statement. Now his audible breathing was starting to irritate me, too. It seemed studied, unnatural, somehow theatrical. My irritation slowly intensified - a reaction that struck me as entirely reasonable and proportionate at the time. It was all beginning to feel like a personal attack. How much contempt must the bearded meditator have for me, I seethed silently, deliberately to decide to ruin the serenity of my meditation by behaving so obnoxiously? Experienced retreat-goers, it turns out, have a term for this phenomenon. The call it 'vipassana vendetta'. In the stillness tiny irritations become magnified into full-blown hate campaigns; the mind is so conditioned to attaching to storylines that it seizes upon whatever's available. Being on retreat had temporarily separated me from all the real causes of distress in my life, and so, apparently, I was inventing new ones. As I shuffled to my narrow bed that evening, I was still smarting about the loud-breathing man. I did let go of the vendetta eventually - but only because I'd fallen into an exhausted and dreamless sleep” - Oliver Burkeman

48. “A heartful mind can always see better than mindless eyes” - Munia Khan

49. “What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?” - Ben Marcus

50. “Visualization engages the mind and encourages the body.” - Lorii Myers