83 Rare and Inspiring Meditation Quotes

In recent years, meditation has been greatly developed and popularized. Meditation Quotes have proliferated and the books on meditation by French authors such as Christophe André or Matthieu Ricard, among others, have significantly helped to popularize the practice of meditation in France.

“Mindfulness” is probably the most famous form of meditation today. It goes far beyond religious beliefs. In fact, it is practiced in new environments such as that of the company or that of the school framework. This is not surprising given the many scientific studies which now prove the benefits of meditation.

In this article, you will discover, through 83 reflections and quotes on meditation, everything that meditative practice makes possible: one can meditate to “disconnect”, to find oneself, to de-stress, to live the present moment, to collect one’s thoughts, or to find inner calm. Meditation enables you to take a step back, see the world differently, feel happier, and develop your creativity. Practicing meditation also helps to silence overly intrusive thoughts, our ego, our suffering and overcome paralyzing fears!

In short, these are fine words to share and…meditate upon to your heart’s content!

Meditation Quotes

Meditation Quotes to Disconnect, De-stress and Find Yourself

• “To promote the development of meditation and transformation of oneself which are at first glance fragile, it is sometimes necessary to plunge into a deep recollection which is more easily found in the quiet solitude of a remote place.” – Matthieu Ricard
• “Meditation is simply the practice of stopping and looking deeply.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
• “Sometimes you just need to disconnect and enjoy your own company.” – Franck Nicolas
• “At the heart of a busy day in which appointments, calls and emails are non-stop, a meditation session can have the effect of the shade offered by a tree under the blazing sun.” – Sebastien Henry
• “Being aware of your breathing and knowing how to touch the wonders of life in yourself is a great joy.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
• “As soon as you turn inside, the meditation begins. Meditation means the capacity to be joyously alone, the capacity to be happy with yourself, the capacity to keep company with yourself. To be with yourself is meditation.” – Osho
• “To meditate is to enter oneself without leaving the world.” – Robert Sabatier

Meditation Quotes to Live the Present moment, Relax and Develop Your Creativity

• “Meditation should always be like this: not following thoughts of past or future, the mind rests in the present, relaxed and non-grasping.” – Bokar Rinpoche
• “Mindfulness is full consciousness, cultivated by awareness of the present moment in a sustained and particular way, willfully in the present, and without judgments.” – Sebastien Henry
• “The present moment is the only moment that can be experienced.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
• “Full presence meditation invites us to accompany with equanimity the permanent movement of life. Thanks to it, we learn to welcome what is, without judgment and without tension: pain like joy, unease like well-being, comfort like discomfort, the pleasant like the unpleasant. It helps us do one of the hardest and most important things in life: accept what is and relax.” – Bokar Rinpoche
• “It is because meditation creates a space of freedom in the mind that creative ideas have a chance to surface.” – Sebastien Henry
• “What can time do against a naked man who meditates alone, at night, facing the sea?” – Yvon Rivard
• “Meditation means being in non-action. Meditation is not an act but a state of being. It is a state of being in one’s own self.” – Osho
• “To meditate is to learn to defuse the bombs that are raining in our minds and to let these scenarios in which we firmly believe evaporate. When the mind serves us the worst of the worst as if it were on a silver platter, just watch, do nothing.” – Alexandre Jollien

Quotes to Find the Time to Meditate and Integrate a Meditative Practice into Everyday Life

• “Meditation is not something you do in the morning and then you are done. Meditation is something that you must continue to experience every moment of your life. When walking, sleeping, sitting, talking, listening: it must become like a kind of atmosphere. A relaxed person dwells in it. A person who continues to let go of the past remains meditative.” – Osho
• “People say they don’t have time to meditate. That’s not true! You can meditate while waiting for the coffee water to boil, while washing yourself, in public transport. You have to get used to being present.” – Tendzin Palmo
• “Half an hour of meditation is essential except when you are very busy. In that case, an hour is needed.” – Saint Francis de Sales
• “Not having time to meditate is like not having time to watch where you’re going because your busy walking.” – Antonin Sertillanges
• “It is not necessary to meditate on behalf of Jesus, Buddha or anyone else. You just have to meditate.” – Yehudi Menuhin

Quotes on Silence in Meditation Practice

• “In meditation, between when the past thoughts cease and before the next thoughts arise, there is an inner silence, an absence of mental chatter, the freshness of the present moment.” – Matthieu Ricard
• “To pray and to meditate is to abandon roles and labels in order to go from living in silence to silence. However, it is a tremendous ordeal. For the agitation to dissipate and the calm to emerge, you have to cross many deserts.” – Alexandre Jollien
• “Great things happen in silence.” – Erik Gustaf Geijer
• “Stillness reveals that which is invisible; like how silence reveals that which is essential. Let us be careful to look after the world before pretending to think we do.” – Christophe André
• “When you act on the awareness of the present moment, everything you do is imbued with a sense of quality, care and love, even the simplest action.” – Eckhart Tolle

Meditation Quotes to Take a Step Back and Perceive the World Differently

• “A serious practice of meditation has the psychological effect of eliciting a new way of perceiving and relating to the world.” – Lawrence LeShan
• “Meditation is not simply to sit quietly in the shade of a tree and relax to enjoy a moment’s respite from daily activities, but to become familiar with a new outlook, a new way of managing one’s thoughts, of perceiving beings and the world of phenomena.” – Matthieu Ricard
• “You will not find peace by reorganizing your condition of life, but by realizing who you are on the deepest level.” – Eckart Tolle
• “The door to change can only be opened from within.” – Jacques Salomé
• ”Meditation forces everyone who has faith and even those who don’t to reflect.” – Victor-Levy Beaulieu
• “Meditation is not an escape but a peaceful encounter with reality.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
• “He who meditates lives in darkness; he who does not meditate lives in blindness. We only have the choice of black.” – Victor Hugo
• “Meditation helps to realize that nothing, fundamentally, can go wrong.” – Sebastien Henry

Meditation Quotes to Free Yourself from Suffering, Strengthen Yourself and Feel Happy

• ”Why meditate? Men are afflicted with many sufferings, anguishes, and fears which they are unable to avoid. The function of meditation is to eliminate this suffering and anxiety.” – Bokar Rinpoche
• “Praying and meditating is gradually giving up talking and thinking all the time. In short, daily practice reveals what pollutes the silence, what prevents us from accessing real joy, from moving forward fresh, free and full of love.” – Alexandre Jollien
• “Meditating is not avoiding problems or fleeing from difficulties. On the contrary, it is finding the strength to face them.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
• “I have made a lot of progress through meditation. Before, my self-knowledge was somewhat intellectual, erratic, and episodic, but now I have a real presence to myself. In meditative practices, we work a lot on presence to oneself: presence to the body, to thoughts, to emotions, to the whole of one’s being. The better quality this presence to oneself is, the more it is a factor of personal progress, and a factor of ability to better help others.” – Christophe André
• “Every time you practice living mindfully, you plant healthy seeds and strengthen those that are already in you.” – Tich Nhat Hanh
• “Meditation draws the soul from a prison, it makes it breathe the heavenly air.” – Pierre-Claude-Victor Boiste

Quotes on the Place of Ego, Mind and Thoughts in Meditation

• “As a wax sculpture exposed to the sun naturally loses its volume every day, meditation (the sun) reduces the size of the ego (the wax statue). It does not attack it, does not destroy it, but weakens it so that it does not block all perspectives.” – Sebastien Henry
• “Concentration is not meditation; concentration is a faculty of the mind. The mind is focused, meditation is the absence of the mind. The mind cannot do anything for meditation. It simply does not know meditation, and there is no intrinsic possibility for the mind to come into contact with meditation. As I just said, darkness cannot come into contact with light because darkness is just an absence: such is the mind. The mind is the absence of meditation. The moment meditation awakens within you, the mind no longer exists.” – Osho
• “There is something in us more radical and deeper than our ‘me’, whatever the name we give it – the self, the Atman, the mind, the nature of Buddha –which the regular practice of meditation enables us to release from the shroud of our ego. ” – Frédéric Lenoir
• “When the ego slips away, peace comes, as if by a miracle. But almost always, “mental FM” broadcasts its background noise: “Go quickly there”, “Do this”; “Do that… To practice meditation is ultimately to try to reduce the impact of these thoughts.” – Alexandre Jollien
• “Thinking and meditation go in totally opposite directions. One goes outward, the other inward. Thinking is the means of knowing the other, meditation is a means of knowing oneself.” – Osho
• “Much more than intellectual brilliance, meditation needs determination, humility, sincerity and patience.” – Matthieu Ricard
• “Contemplating nature creates poets; Meditating upon destiny creates thinkers.” – Victor Hugo
• “Meditation is an operation of the mind that the heart often interrupts.” – Sylvain Marshal
• “Let us know how to reflect, meditate, reason; without these, man and beast are the same.” – Antoine Houdar de La Motte

Quotes on Meditation and Neuroscience

• “Imagine your brain is a lump of clay, something you can shape and manipulate however you want, strengthening the most important areas. In a way, meditation makes your brain look like clay; it allows you to reconfigure your gray matter and make structural changes in the brain – this is called “synaptic plasticity.” – Onur Karapinar
• “Meditation can induce profound changes in the brain. From a cognitive science perspective, one could describe meditation as a systematic effort to focus attention and the mental and emotional faculties that go with it.” – Mathieu Ricard
• “Thirty years ago, the scientific community considered it totally outlandish to believe that mental events had any major influence on the body. Meditation was seen as an exotic practice brought back from the East by hippies who had smoked too much weed. Things have changed a great deal since then.” – Matthieu Ricard

Metaphorical Quotes on Meditation

• “In meditation texts, the free spirit is sometimes compared to water, and the spirit tied up by mental constructions to ice. You only have to heat the ice so that it becomes fluid.” – Matthieu Ricard
• “Until we understand what the mind is, we are a bit like someone who is on the beach and who thinks that the sea should have absolutely no waves. When a wave comes towards him, he would like to take it and throw it to one side, then take the next one and throw it to the other side. And even if, regardless of his efforts, the sea is calm at times, the waves would inevitably form again. Anyone who hopes to have a sea permanently devoid of waves would only be constantly disappointed. Wanting, during meditation, to eliminate thoughts, is to put yourself in the same situation.” – Bokar Rinpoche
• “Meditation is a source of self-awareness. As we slow down and focus our attention on ourselves, things we never notice appear. It’s as if we were temporarily switching from a car going at 150 km/h in the countryside to a bicycle: we can appreciate the scenery better.” – Sebastien Henry
• “A widely used traditional metaphor is that of muddy water: water that has been mixed with dirt and stirred in a container becomes clearer over time, with the dirt gradually settling to the bottom. Through the practice of meditation, righteous decisions emerge from mental turmoil, helping to ‘make complicated things simple’.” – Sebastien Henry
• “Meditation is to the productions of the domain of the mind and of observation what the sun is to those of the earth: it alone can ripen them.” – Felix Bogaerts

Buddha and Dalai Lama Quotes on Meditative Practice

• “From meditation comes wisdom.” – Buddha
• “Those who engage in clear meditation quickly find joy in all that is good. He sees that riches and beauty are impermanent and that wisdom is the most precious of jewels.” – Buddha
• “We are what we think. All that we are is the result of our thoughts.” – Buddha
• “Accept what is, let go what was, trust what will be.” – Buddha
• “Don’t dwell in the past, don’t dream of the future, focus your mind on the present moment.” – Buddha
• “Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace.”- Dalai Lama
• “The more you respect an ordinary person, the closer you feel to them and the more you are ready to follow their advice. Likewise, the more faith you have in your teacher, the more progress you will make in your practice.” – Dalai Lama

Meditation Quotes and Various Sayings from Buddhist Sages

• “If meditation were taught to every 8-year-old child on Earth, we would eliminate violence from the world, within a generation.” – Tenzin Gyatzo
• “Meditation is the major art of being human.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti
• “Without meditation, we are blind in a world of great beauty, full of lights and colors.” – Jiddu Krishnamurti
• “Meditate on the light. First, you are the light. Then, the light is in you. Finally, you are the light.” – Sathya Sai Baba
• “When breathing is unstable, the mind is unstable; when breathing is stable, the mind is stable, and the yogi attains stillness. That is why one has to master breathing.” – Hatha Yoga Pradipika
• “Zen is a practice that prompts us to experience what is, to realize it, to actualize it.” – Bodhidharma
• “Even if the place of meditation is small, it encloses the universe. Even if our mind is small, it is limitless…” – Master Sekito
• “Having meditated on gentleness and compassion, I forgot the difference between myself and others.” – Milarepa
• “How to define meditation? It is wisdom seeking wisdom.” – Shunryu Suzuki
• “To meditate is to look deeply into the heart of things.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
• “What good is ‘beautiful meditation’ if it does not result in an improvement of the whole being, which then puts itself at the service of others?” – Matthieu Ricard
• “Meditation enables us to relate to a larger dimension of the self.” – Milarepa
• “The gift of learning to meditate is the greatest gift you can give yourself in this life. For it is only through meditation that you can undertake the journey to discover your true nature, and thus find the stability and the confidence necessary to live and die well. Meditation is the road to enlightenment.” – Sogyal Rinpoche

Meditation Quotes from Ancient Philosophers

• “We have to meditate on what brings happiness, since when we have it, we have everything, and when it is lacking, we do everything to have it.” – Epictetus
• “Meditate on the right precepts, work to put them into practice.” Publilius Syrus
• “Man’s mind is nurtured by study and meditation.” – Cicero
• “Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.” – Marcus Aurelius

Meditation Quotes of Oriental Proverbs

• “Meditate and you will understand.” – Oriental Proverb
• “Seek truth in meditation, not in moldy books. Look in the sky to find the moon, not in the pond.” – Persian Proverb
• “Do good to your body so that your soul will want to stay there.” – Indian Proverb

What about you? What do you think of meditation? Are you a fan of it? Which meditation quote resonates with you the most? Share your thoughts in the comments!