Vipassana Quotes

“Vipassana meditation is an ongoing creative purification process. Observation of the moment-to-moment experience cleanses the mental layers, one after another.”
― Amit Ray, Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style

“The study of modern mindfulness meditation and emotional intelligence is deeply rooted in the ancient Vipassana meditation techniques.”
― Amit Ray, Mindfulness Meditation for Corporate Leadership and Management

“If you don't have the treasure of Noble truth, you are still poor even if you have loads of money and wealth. Because external wealth are belongs to this world. You have to leave them here.”
― Suman Jyoty Bhante

“We attach to anything or anybody because we think that they make us happy. We attach to the happiness so much. On the other hand we can say that we only attach to the happiness. Not to anything else or anybody else.”
― Suman Jyoty Bhante

“Vipassanā isn’t about becoming perfectly calm.
It’s about becoming real — moment by moment.
Grief doesn’t ask you to get over it. Love doesn’t require you to be fearless. Vipassanā says: just notice what’s here… and stay.
That is more than enough.”
― G. Scott Graham, Come As You Are: Five Years Later

“When you do good, let it be good in line with nature. Don't latch onto the thought that you're good. If you get attached to the idea that you're good, it will give rise to lots of other attachments.”
― Suman Jyoty Bhante

“COURTESY

We never talk ill of a departed soul; our world
would be a much nicer place if we extended the
same courtesy to those who are yet to depart.”
― Amar Ochani, Inner Explorations of a Seeker

“BE HAPPY

90% of our worries are about things that may
never happen; the remaining 10% are about
things that have already happened.”
― Amar Ochani, Inner Explorations of a Seeker

“Look upon friend and foe with equal regard, be not lifted up by praise or cast down by blame, regard heat and cold, pleasure and pain, honor and dishonor with the same quiet inner eye in harmony with all creation.”
― G.J. Berger, Four Nails

“Sitting daily sounds simple. But in real life — with real demands, distractions, and inner resistance — it's hard. Not because the technique is flawed, but because we were never trained to build a life around it,”
― G. Scott Graham, Now what? After Your Vipassana Course Is Over

“Vipassanā isn’t about feeling something — it’s about doing something, over and over again.
And like any form of training — physical, mental, or spiritual — there is no shortcut. You can’t bypass the work. You can’t meditate your way around impermanence. You can only meet it — again and again — with awareness and equanimity.”
― G. Scott Graham, Now what? After Your Vipassana Course Is Over

“Practice is not a measurement of your worth. It’s a commitment to stay aligned with truth.
That’s why we don’t chase perfection. We chase presence.”
― G. Scott Graham, Now what? After Your Vipassana Course Is Over

“Live every day as someone who remembers what you saw on that cushion — that everything changes, that craving creates misery, that you have the capacity to respond with awareness instead of reaction.”
― G. Scott Graham, Now what? After Your Vipassana Course Is Over

“If you believe your practice only “counts” when you’re sitting with your eyes closed, you’re missing 90% of the path.
Your cushion is your lab.
Your life is the field.
That’s where real practice happens.”
― G. Scott Graham, Now what? After Your Vipassana Course Is Over

“One of the great myths of meditation practice is that once it’s established, it becomes self-sustaining.
That’s rarely true.”
― G. Scott Graham, Now what? After Your Vipassana Course Is Over

“If your meditation schedule becomes another way to feel like a disappointment, it’s no longer a practice — it’s a punishment.”
― G. Scott Graham, Now what? After Your Vipassana Course Is Over

“People talk about practice like it’s just a matter of willpower. If you really cared, you’d sit. If you really understood impermanence, you wouldn’t skip.
That’s bullshit.
Willpower burns out. Discipline gets interrupted. Even the best of intentions get buried under work stress, family obligations, grief, exhaustion, or just inertia.”
― G. Scott Graham, Now what? After Your Vipassana Course Is Over

“Suffering is waiting. Equanimity is optional. Presence is the path.”
― G. Scott Graham, Now what? After Your Vipassana Course Is Over

“Never forget to your parents, If there is anyone who loves you really more than theirself its Only parents. Respect their feelings and emotion. They are most well wisher of their child.”
― Suman Jyoty Thera

“Knowing ownself is better than to knowing others.”
― Suman Jyoty Bhante

“WORK

Work is never hard or soft; it becomes
hard when we have no heart in it.”
― Amar Ochani, Inner Explorations of a Seeker

“WOMEN

If you want to imagine the world without women,
imagine a world without love and light.”
― Amar Ochani, Inner Explorations of a Seeker

“Religions are like a ladder. If you cling to them, you cannot progress further. Religious organizations have their hidden agenda. They heavily rely on the past. They want to drag you towards the past. But you have to stand on your own. You have to work for your own liberation. Liberation is a state of mind and that is achievable right in this moment. It all depends on your choice. The moment you take the decision, you are free from the past; you are free from the thoughts.”
― Amit Ray, Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Life Style

“As a psychological practice, this Way allows you to break negative states into small manageable pieces, thus loosening their power over you. By “negative states” I mean things like difficult emotions, limiting beliefs, judgments, urges leading to unproductive behaviors, and so forth. By “manageable pieces” I mean individual images, individual self-talk phrases, and specific body locations where the emotional sensations are arising. Learning to focus on just one of these at a given moment will reduce your sense of overwhelm. You stop being like a ping-pong ball pummeled about by words in your head, emotions in your body and pictures on your mental screen.”
― Shinzen Young, Five Ways to Know Yourself

“The sound of silence was beginning to get louder, and familiar. And I was deeply in love with it.

Not only does it not involve religious practices, it makes you shed all religious affiliations for ten days. What you are left with is your bare breath. That becomes the only thing you focus on – your personal rosary.

There are no pictures of gurus, or even of the Buddha himself. There are no personalised gods or its dubious derivates – dogmas, or godmen – to prostrate before. No hugs, kisses, threads, amulets, satins or holy ash. No holy ‘trap’ of devices designed for an instant osmosis of blessings. No grand trickery that makes life here a hell in promise of a heaven there. It shows us the same arduous path that some of the enlightened men have walked. Men who can only show the path and are not the destination; where they communed with their truth, or, for lack of a better word, their God, in silence. The choice is left to us, to walk, stroll, stray, or squat on that path. [Many men; Ab to Za, all those alphabets and all the other men in between… Same grand truth, revealed in parts… Same path, seemingly different… Same destination…. No single path.] But Vipassana does not offer us the easier path of pleading, coaxing, extorting or seducing such men for easy blessings.
It nudges you to start walking. To be your own blessing. To create your own miracles.”
― Rasal, I Killed the Golden Goose : A COLLECTION OF THOUGHTS, THOUGHTLESSNESS, SILENCES, POEMS & SOME ‘SHOT’ STORIES

“The sound of silence was beginning to get louder, and familiar. And I was deeply in love with it.


I stopped being mute, and became dumb again.

There are no pictures of gurus, or even of the Buddha himself. There are no personalised gods or its dubious derivates – dogmas, or godmen – to prostrate before. No hugs, kisses, threads, amulets, satins or holy ash. No grand trickery that makes life here a hell in promise of a heaven there. It shows us the same arduous path that some of the enlightened men have walked. Men who can only show the path and are not the destination; where they communed with their truth, or, for lack of a better word, their God, in silence. The choice is left to us, to walk, stroll, stray, or squat on that path. [Many men; Ab to Za, all those letters of alphabets and all the other men in between… Same grand truth, revealed in parts… Same path, seemingly different… Same destination…. No single path.] But Vipassana does not offer us the easier path of pleading, coaxing, extorting or seducing such men for easy blessings.
It nudges you to start walking. To be your own blessing. To create your own miracles.”
― Rasal, I Killed the Golden Goose : A COLLECTION OF THOUGHTS, THOUGHTLESSNESS, SILENCES, POEMS & SOME ‘SHOT’ STORIES

“Patience leads to Nibbana,” as the saying goes. This saying is most relevant in meditational effort. One must be patient in meditation. If one shifts or changes one’s posture too often because one cannot be patient with the sensation of stiffness or heat that arises, samadhi (good concentration) cannot develop. If samadhi cannot develop, insight cannot result and there can be no attainment of magga (the path that leads to Nibbana), phala (the fruit of that path) and Nibbana. That is why patience is needed in meditation. It is patience mostly with unpleasant sensations in the body like stiffness, sensations of heat and pain, and other sensations that are hard to bear. One should not immediately give up one’s meditation on the appearance of such sensations and change one’s meditational posture. One should go on patiently, just noting as “stiffness, stiffness” or “hot, hot.” Moderate sensations of these kinds will disappear if one goes on noting them patiently. [...] One then reverts to noting the rising and falling of the abdomen.”
― Mahasi Sayadaw, Fundamentals of Vipassana Meditation

“In terms of action, Dzogchen is not limited by any rules; therefore, no action is forbidden as such. Rather, Dzogchen practice aims at bringing immediate Awareness into every action, and the manifestation of that Intrinsic Awareness is one's true will. Awareness and intention are not at war with each other but are integrated. In the state of contemplation, the Bodhicitta compassion is natural and spontaneous; it is not contrived or created by mind. But this is true only when we are in the state of contemplation. The state of Rigpa is beyond karma and its consequences, beyond good and evil, but our ordinary dualistic consciousness is most definitely not. Being primordially pure, Rigpa is beyond selfish motivations, and all its actions are spontaneously self-perfected. All this is true of contemplation, but if we merely claim to be a Siddha, announcing proudly, 'I am in a state of Rigpa!' and do as we like, following every impulse and indulging all transient desires, we merely delude ourselves and will suffer the karmic consequences. To think we are in the state is not the same as actually being in the state. The only rule in Dzogchen is to be aware. Dzogchen teaches us to take responsibility for our actions, and this is what awareness means. We are always aware of what we do and also of the consequences that each action entails. Integration with movement is not at all the same as attachment, for the latter represents a lack of awareness.”
― John Myrdhin Reynolds, The Golden Letters: The Tibetan Teachings of Garab Dorje, First Dzogchen Master

“They allow the spark of sensation to ignite a raging fire before trying to extinguish it, needlessly making difficulties for themselves. But if they learn to observe the sensations within the body objectively, they permit each spark to burn itself out without starting a conflagration.”
― William Hart, (The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation as Taught by S.N. Goenka) [By: Hart, William] [May, 1987]

“They also noticed that negative thoughts like anger or hatred, or thoughts of vice like promiscuity, lust, etc, disrupted the smooth flow of breathing: the breath grew ragged, heavy and uneven. Moreover, thoughts also triggered physical sensations on the surface of the skin that matched the thought. If one reacted to the sensations by scratching or acting on the sensation, then the sensations would increase and support that thought.
“Similarly, as a reaction to an external stimulant, let’s say a word, the sense of hearing would come into play and then the subconscious mind would interpret it with the conditioning of the society. If the word was pleasant, the sensations generated would be pleasant and if it were an abuse, the sensations would be unpleasant and so on. The immediate reaction of a ‘normal’ person would be to retaliate with an equally offensive word. But the rishis realized that if they merely observed the sensation, it would eventually go away and the thought associated with the reaction, weakened. Over a period of time, the reactive thoughts would completely die out and one would rationally respond to a situation. Most importantly, this resulted in inner peace.”
― Ajay Chaturvedi, Lost Wisdom of the Swastika