68 Inspiring Mindfulness Quotes

Nov. 28, 2024, 10:45 a.m.

68 Inspiring Mindfulness Quotes

In today's fast-paced world, finding moments of stillness and clarity can be challenging. Practicing mindfulness, however, offers a pathway to reconnecting with the present, fostering a sense of peace and awareness amidst the chaos. Whether you're new to mindfulness or a seasoned practitioner, words have a profound power to inspire and guide us. In our curated collection of 68 inspiring mindfulness quotes, you'll find wisdom from diverse voices that speak to the heart of living a mindful life. These quotes serve as gentle reminders to pause, breathe, and embrace the beauty of now. Dive into this collection and let these words enrich your mindfulness journey, offering moments of reflection and inspiration.

1. “The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye.” - Charlotte Brontë

2. “A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

3. “It is foolish to wish for beauty. Sensible people never either desire it for themselves or care about it in others. If the mind be but well cultivated, and the heart well disposed, no one ever cares for the exterior.” - Anne Brontë

4. “I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.” - Leo Tolstoy

5. “Mathematical Knowledge adds a manly Vigour to the Mind, frees it from Prejudice, Credulity, and Superstition.” - John Arbuthnot

6. “At that moment I had no mind to change, or not change, or throw against the nearest wall.” - James Patterson

7. “Sorry... my mind was wandering... one time it went all the way to Venus and ordered a meal I couldn’t pay for.” - Steven Wright

8. “Human is a suffered mind but an enlightened soul.” - Santosh Kalwar

9. “My heart knows what my mind only think it knows.” - Noah BenShea

10. “Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.” - Hermann Hesse

11. “Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation.” - Rabindranath Tagore

12. “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

13. “To know a man's library is, in some measure, to know a man's mind.” - Geraldine Brooks

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. “Joy blooms where minds and hearts are open.” - Jonathan Lockwood Huie

16. “Leaving out appraisal also would render the biological description of the phenomena of emotion vulnerable to the caricature that emotions without an appraisal phase are meaningless events. It would be more difficult to see how beautiful and amazingly intelligent emotions can be, and how powerfully they can solve problems for us.” - Antonio Damasio

17. “How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.” - Andrew Sean Greer

18. “The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind. Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor — not because the new guideline will be truer to nature (for neither the old nor the new metaphor lies “out there” in the woods), but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent of conceptual transition.” - Stephen Jay Gould

19. “We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.” - Pierre Simon de Laplace

20. “The heart has its reasons but the mind makes the excuses.” - Amit Abraham

21. “Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can.” - William Feather

22. “People will always prefer black-and-white over shades of grey, and so there will always be the temptation to hold overly-simplified beliefs and to hold them with excessive confidence” - Thomas Gilovich

23. “But there were too many points at which the other self could invade the self he wanted to preserve, and there were too many forms of invasion: certain words, sounds, lights, actions his hands or feet performed, and if he did nothing at all, heard and saw nothing, the shouting of some triumphant inner voice that shocked him and cowed him.” - Patricia Highsmith

24. “Wit and puns aren't just decor in the mind; they're essential signs that the mind knows it's on, recognizes its own software, can spot the bugs in its own program.” - Adam Gopnik

25. “I would not bend.They could not make me Pliable.My mind was strong.My mind was mine.” - Janice Hardy

26. “It is as though we are understanding now what (William) Blake intuited, the senses were, in Eden, spread over the whole being. It might seem, then, that our bodies still live in Eden, but our minds refuse to know it.” - Peter Redgrove

27. “Spell is a structured words that creates miracles in mind.” - Toba Beta

28. “The mind picks some very bad times to take a walk doesn't it?” - Jeff Lindsay

29. “So that it must be only by the imagination that Satan has access to the soul, to tempt and delude it, or suggest anything to it. And this seems to be the reason why persons that are under the disease of melancholy are commonly so visibly and remarkably subject to the suggestions and temptations of Satan... Innumerable are the ways by which the mind may be led on to all kind of evil thoughts, by the exciting of external ideas in the imagination.” - Jonathan Edwards

30. “When a man touches a woman's body, he is not just touching her body. It goes MUCH DEEPER than that for a woman. He is touching parts of her soul-parts as diverse as how she feels about being a grandmother some day, to what is her favorite ice cream, to how much she loves her pet, and to her opinion of how the current President is governing. The man wants a sexual encounter and love is far from his mind; she desires permanence, commitment, safety, and security.” - Jim Anderson

31. “The mind is left bereft when it is nothing more than a tool of regurgitation.” - Corey Taylor

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

33. “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

34. “The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.” - Gregory Maguire

35. “Invariably, we all are 'MIND LORDS'.” - Ogwo David Emenike

36. “People tend to be generous when sharing their nonsense, fear, and ignorance. And while they seem quite eager to feed you their negativity, please remember that sometimes the diet we need to be on is a spiritual and emotional one. Be cautious with what you feed your mind and soul. Fuel yourself with positivity and let that fuel propel you into positive action.” - Steve Maraboli

37. “Juilin," she asked hesitantly, "what were you going to do with the salt and cooking oil? Not exactly," she added more quickly. "Just a general idea." He looked at her for a moment. "I do not know. But they did not, either. That is the trick of it; their minds made up worse then I ever could. I have seen a tough man break when I sent for a basket of figs and some mice.” - Robert Jordan

38. “In a swamp, as in meditation, you begin to glimpse how elusive, how inherently insubstantial, how fleeting our thoughts are, our identities. There is magic in this moist world, in how the mind lets go, slips into sleepy water, circles and nuzzles the banks of palmetto and wild iris, how it seeps across dreams, smears them into the upright world, rots the wood of treasure chests, welcomes the body home.” - Barbara Hurd

39. “... how terrible is the pain of the mind and heart when the freedom of mankind is suppressed!” - E.A. Bucchianeri

40. “The reassuring smile was now useless. I was plastic. Everything was veiled. Objectivity, facts, hard information--these were things only in the outline stage. There was nothing tying anything together yet, so the mind built up a defense, and the evidence was restructured, and that was what I tried to do on that morning--to restructure the evidence so it made sense--and that is what I failed at.” - Bret Easton Ellis

41. “While spirituality provides an efficient and endless fuel for your mind and body, you must burn that fuel with human action towards your goals, dreams, and desires.” - Steve Maraboli

42. “Memoria - fie memoria individuală, fie memoria colectivă care este cultura - are o dublă funcție. Una, într-adevăr, e să conserve anumite date, cealaltă să cufunde în uitare informațiile ce nu ne folosesc și care ne-ar putea încărca inutil mințile.” - Jean-Claude Carrière

43. “As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or "terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. THe work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes.” - Don DeLillo

44. “She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.” - Ayn Rand

45. “Religion is like drugs, it destroys the thinking mind.” - George Carlin

46. “It places value on experience versus intellectual understanding. I saw a lot of people contemplating things but it didn't seem to lead to too many places. I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than an intellectual, abstract understanding.” - Steve Jobs

47. “Your perspective is always limited by how much you know. Expand your knowledge and you will transform your mind.” - Bruce H. Lipton

48. “The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.” - Alain De Botton

49. “I begin to realize that my memory is a great catacomb, and that below my actual standing-ground there is layer after layer of historical ashes. Is the life of mind something like that of great trees of immemorial growth? Is the living layer of consciousness super-imposed upon hundreds of dead layers? Dead? No doubt this is too much to say, but still, when memory is slack the past becomes almost as though it had never been. To remember that we did know once is not a sign of possession but a sign of loss; it is like the number of an engraving which is no longer on its nail, the title of a volume no longer to be found on its shelf. My mind is the empty frame of a thousand vanished images.” - Henri Frédéric Amiel

50. “You don’t have to stay trapped in your thoughts just because you think them.” - Doug Dillon

51. “Life is like a sandwich!Birth as one slice,and death as the other.What you put in-between the slices is up to you.Is your sandwich tasty or sour?Allan Rufus.org” - Allan Rufus

52. “Suffering builds character and impels you to penetrate life’s secrets. It’s the path of great artists, great religious leaders, great social reformers. The problem is not suffering per se, but rather our identification with our own ego: our divided, dualistic, cramped view of things. ‘We are too ego-centered,’ Suzuki tells Cage.’ The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow. We seem to carry it all the time from childhood up to the time we finally pass away.” - Kay Larson

53. “It's a mind, it works by metaphor.” - Simon J. Townley

54. “If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.” - Marc Chagall

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

56. “God has given all of us both the mind and the heart. And He fully expects us to use them” - R. Alan Woods

57. “If your mind is expansive and unfettered, you will find yourself in a more accommodating world, a place that's endlessly interesting and alive. That quality isn't inherent in the place but in your state of mind.” - Pema Chodron

58. “For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones” - Oliver Burkeman

59. “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

60. “But there is saying, and there is doing, and almost always people do something better than they can talk about it, as though the minded body defeats every attempt to select out only the mind part as deserving sole responsibility for the success.” - Alice Koller

61. “An odd thing about perception is that when we identify some new thing with one or more of our five senses, it is not really, immutably real -- it is a passing will o’ the wisp, an artifact of the senses and the translations of the brain until we get used to it and we give it a home in our hearts” - Nigel Hey

62. “The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

63. “Beauty lies in the mind, inner soul....Beauty lies in the innocence, appreciation, understanding, warmth, expressions, caring nature, behavior towards others, the depth of understanding the situations, the kind of sufferings, struggles, losses, difficulties, sorrows, happiness- the thick n thins through which person sails throughout hi/her life. Which ultimately reflects on your face- the ultimate reflection of your mind and thus evolves a beautiful personality.” - Sriveena Dhagavkar

64. “I do not think either virginity or old age contemptible, and some of the shrewdest minds I have met inhabited the bodies of old maids.” - C.S. Lewis

65. “It was strange what Chris was feeling within, but he didn’t mind for he was loving her.” - Moffat Machingura

66. “Travelling, whether in the mental or the physical world, is a joy, and it is good to know that, in the mental world at least, there are vast countries still very imperfectly explored” - Bertrand Russell

67. “Keep a positive mind. Remember, a failed attempt doesn’t make you a failure—giving up does.” - Lorii Myers

68. “The greatest crimes in the world are not committed against the body, but against the freedom of the consciousness.” - Bryant McGill