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The Buddha Quotes

It [enlightenment] has not come to you by means of teaching! And-thus is my thought, oh exalted one,-nobody will obtain salvation by means of teachings! (character of Siddhartha, speaking to the Buddha)
- Hermann Hesse

Half smiling, with imperturbable brightness and friendliness, the Buddha looked steadily at the stranger and dismissed him with a hardly visible gesture. 'You are clever, O Samana,' said the Illustrious One, 'you know how to speak cleverly, my friend. Be on your guard against too much cleverness.
- Hermann Hesse

After the bare requisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed. He leaves his proof on wood, on stone or on the lives of other people. This deep desire exists in everyone, from the boy who writes dirty words in a public toilet to the Buddha who etches his image in the race mind. Life is so unreal. I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying to prove that we do.
- John Steinbeck

Your nature is the Buddha.
- Bodhidharma

The mind is the Buddha, and the Buddha is the mind.
- Bodhidharma

But deluded people don't realize that their own mind is the Buddha. They keep searching outside.
- Bodhidharma

The Buddha is your real body, your original mind.
- Bodhidharma

And the Buddha is the person who's free: free of plans, free of cares.
- Bodhidharma

As long as you look for a Buddha somewhere else, you'll never see that your own mind is the Buddha.
- Bodhidharma

If you use your mind to look for a Buddha, you won't see the Buddha.
- Bodhidharma

Mindfulness, the aware, balanced acceptance of present experience, is at the heart of what the Buddha taught. This book is meant to be a basic Buddhist primer, but no one should be daunted. It's easier than you think [p. 4]
- Sylvia Boorstein

The Buddha taught complete honesty, with the extra instruction that everything a person says should be truthful and helpful.
- Sylvia Boorstein

If you meet the Buddha in the lane, feed him the ball.
- Phil Jackson

The foundation of the Buddha's teachings lies in compassion, and the reason for practicing the teachings is to wipe out the persistence of ego, the number-one enemy of compassion.
- Dalai Lama

There is only one important point you must keep in your mind and let it be your guide. No matter what people call you, you are just who you are. Keep to this truth. You must ask yourself how is it you want to live your life. We live and we die, this is the truth that we can only face alone. No one can help us, not even the Buddha. So consider carefully, what prevents you from living the way you want to live your life?
- Dalai Lama

Whether our action is wholesome or unwholesome depends on whether that action or deed arises from a disciplined or undisciplined state of mind. It is felt that a disciplined mind leads to happiness and an undisciplined mind leads to suffering, and in fact it is said that bringing about discipline within one's mind is the essence of the Buddha's teaching.
- Dalai Lama

Every faith in the world is based on fabrication... Every religion describes God through metaphor, allegory, and exaggeration, from the early Egyptians through modern Sunday school... Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that we have proof the Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical.
- Dan Brown

I am moonlighting for the Buddha.
- John Burdett

Scientists, therefore, are responsible for their research, not only intellectually but also morally. This responsibility has become an important issue in many of today's sciences, but especially so in physics, in which the results of quantum mechanics and relativity theory have opened up two very different paths for physicists to pursue. They may lead us - to put it in extreme terms - to the Buddha or to the Bomb, and it is up to each of us to decide which path to take.
- Fritjof Capra

I play a female Indiana Jones, a professor who hunts down precious objects, like a bowl that belonged to the Buddha. They tailored the role to me: I wanted to be smart, funny, and to kick some ass.
- Tia Carrere

To consider only one other such witness: the followers of the Buddha have at least as much right to appeal to individual and social experience in support of the authority of the Eastern saviour.
- William Kingdon Clifford

The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.
- John Green

We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.
- John Green

It is a weakening and discoloring idea that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time but that it is too late for us. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less. There is no whit less enlightnment under the tree by your street than there was under the Buddha's bo tree.
- Annie Dillard

He told me not to seek revenge, but to seek the Buddha,' said the fox spirit, sadly.
'Wise counsel,' said the fox of dreams. 'Vegeance can be a road that has no ending. You would be wise to avoid it. And...?'
'I shall seek the Buddha,' said the fox, with a toss of her head. 'But first I shall seek revenge.
- Neil Gaiman

The word desire suggests that there is something we do not have. If we have everything already, then there can be no desire, for there is nothing left to want. I think that what the Buddha may have been trying to tell us is that we have it all, each of us, all the time; therefore, desire is simply unnecessary.
- Tom Robbins

The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea but with the people who are attracted to it, who adopt it, who cling to it until their last nail breaks, and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and, most importantly, sense of humor, to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogma by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.
- Tom Robbins

Why is it that sometimes our prayers seem not to be answered? This is a manifestation of the Buddha's wisdom, so that we can deepen our prayers, become stronger people, live more profound lives and secure deeper, more lasting good fortune. If our slightest prayer was answered immediately, we would become lazy and degenerate. And we could not hope to build a life of great dignity and substance.
- Daisaku Ikeda

The only theism worthy of our respect believes in God not because of the way the world is made but in spite of that. The only theism that is no less profound than the Buddha's atheism is that represented in the Bible by Job and Jeremiah.
- Walter Kaufmann

A man met the Buddha after the Buddha became enlightened. The man was awed by his remarkable radiance.
"What are you?" the man asked. "Are you some kind of celestial being? A god, perhaps?"
"No," said the Buddha.
"Well, then, are you a magician or wizard?"
"No," the Buddha answered again.
"Are you a man?"
"No."
"Well, then, what are you?"
"I am awake," the Buddha replied
- Linda Leaming

Miracles are (in late documents, I believe) recorded of the Buddha. But what could be more absurd than that he who came to teach us that Nature is an illusion from which we must escape should occupy himself in producing effects on the Natural level-that he who comes to wake us from the nightmare should add to the nightmare? The more we respect his teaching the less we could accept his miracles.
- C S Lewis

The Buddhas had to be destroyed by the Taliban to get the world thinking about Afghanistan.
- Mohsen Makhmalbaf

I think this is a bodhi tree," I said, "just like Buddha sat under! It's so exciting. I'm feeling sort of enlightened just standing here. Really, I can feel ripe bodhies squishing between my toes."
Joshua looked at my feet. "I don't think those are bodhies. There was a cow here before us."
I lifted my foot out of the mess. "Cows are overrated in this country. Under the Buddha's tree too. Is nothing sacred?
- Christopher Moore

All the buddhas of all the ages have been telling you a very simple fact:
Be don't try to become. Within these two words, be and becoming,
your whole life is contained. Being is enlightenment, becoming is ignorance. Osho
- Osho

How could the Buddha have believed that being incarnated as a human being was fortunate? Had he ever been to Georgia?
- Brenda Peterson

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower.
- Robert M Pirsig

There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask the question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everwhere.
- Robert M Pirsig

consider," replies the geomancer, "--adam and eve ate fruit from a tree, and were enlighten'd. the buddha sat beneath a tree, and he was enlighten'd. newton, also sitting beneath a tree, was hit by a falling apple,--and he was enlighten'd. a quick overview would suggest trees produce enlightenment. trees are not the problem. the forest is not an agent of darkness. but it may be your visto is.
- Thomas Pynchon

Taoist chanting, Confucian chanting, Christian chanting, Buddhist chanting dont matter. Chanting Coca Cola, Coca Cola, Coca Cola ... can be just as good if you keep a clear mind. But if you dont keep a clear mind, and are only following your thinking as you mouth the words, even the Buddha cannot help you.
- Seung Sahn

The Buddha taught that all life is suffering. We might also say that life, being both attractive and constantly dangerous, is intoxicating and ultimately toxic. 'Toxic' comes from toxicon, Pendell tells us, with a root meaning of 'a poisoned arrow.' All organic life is struck by the arrows of real and psychic poisons. This is understood by any true, that is to say, not self-deluding, spiritual path.
- Gary Snyder

Okay, I wasn't getting something, by there was nothing I could do about it. I wasn't the Buddha. I couldn't have a vision. Unless, maybe, it was drug-induced.
- Nancy Werlin

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