Gautama Buddha Quotes
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No one can escape death and unhappiness. If people expect only happiness in life, they will be disappointed.
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When you like a flower, you just pluck it. But when you love a flower, you water it daily.
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Believe nothing because it is written in books. Believe nothing because wise men say it is so. Believe nothing because it is religious doctrine. Believe it only because you yourself know it to be true.
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Joyful is the accumulation of good work.
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Let your diet be spare, your wants moderate, your needs few. So, living modestly, with no distracting desires, you will find content.
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For soon the body is discarded, Then what does it feel? A useless log of wood, it lies on the ground, Then what does it know? Your worst enemy cannot harm you As much as your own thoughts, unguarded. But once mastered, No one can help you as much, Not even your father or your mother.
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'As I am, so are these. As are these, so am I.' Drawing the parallel to yourself, neither kill nor get others to kill.
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True and lasting inner peace can never be found in external things. It can only be found within in. And then, once we find and nurture it with ourselves, it radiates outward.
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How easy it is to see your brother's faults, How hard it is to face your own. You winnow his in the wind like chaff, But yours you hide, Like a cheat covering up an unlucky throw. Dwelling on your brother's faults Multiplies your own. You are far from the end of your journey. The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart. See how you love.
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The mind contains all possibilities.
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Delusions, errors and lies are like huge, gaudy vessels, the rafters of which are rotten and worm-eaten, and those who embark in them are fated to be shipwrecked.
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Well-makers lead the water (wherever they like) ; fletchers bend the arrow ; carpenters bend a log of wood ; wise people fashion themselves.
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When a man venerates those worthy of veneration, be they Buddhas or their disciples, who have transcended all obstacles and passed beyond sorrow and tears - venerating such as these, whose passions are extinguished and for whom there is no further source for fear, no one can calculate how great his merit is.
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Sandalwood, tagara, lotus, jasmine - the fragrance of virtue is unrivalled by such kinds of perfume.
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You have to do your own work; Enlightened Ones will only show the way. Those who practise meditation will free themselves from the chains of death.
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Apply yourself to solitude. One who is given to solitude knows things as they really are.
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The four catagories of existance, non-existance, both existance and non-existance, and neither existance nor non-existance, are spiderwebs among spiderwebs which can never take hold of the enormous bird of reality.
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Those who awaken never rest in one place. Like swans, they rise and leave the lake. On the air they rise and fly an invisible course. Their food is knowledge. They live on emptiness. They have seen how to break free. Who can follow them?
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Neither in the sky nor in mid-ocean, nor by entering into mountain clefts, nowhere in the world is there a place where one may escape from the results of evil deeds.
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A man who will be the public leader, must know how to be the public follower.
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Confusion conditions activity, which conditions consciousness, which conditions embodied personality, which conditions sensory experiences, which conditions impact, which conditions mood, which conditions craving, which conditions clinging, which conditions becoming, which conditions birth, which conditions aging and death.
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Mind precedes all phenomena, mind matters most, everything is mind-made. If with an impure mind, you speak or act, then suffering follows you as the cartwheel follows the foot of the draft animal. If with a pure mind, you speak or act, then happiness follows you as a shadow that never departs.
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The wise say that it is not an iron, wooden or fiber fetter which is a strong one, but the besotted hankering after trinkets, children and wives, that, say the wise, is the strong fetter. It drags one down, and loose as it feels, it is hard to break. Breaking this fetter, people renounce the world, free from longing and abandoning sensuality.
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One act of pure love in saving life is greater than spending the whole of one's time in religious offerings to the gods . . .