When torpid and over-fed, a sleepy-head lolling about like a stout hog, fattened on fodder: a dullard enters the womb over and over again.

- Dhammapada, 325, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu


When you try to get rid of dear or anger, what happens? You just get restless or discouraged and have to go eat something or smoke or drink or do something else. But if you wait and endure restlessness, greed, hatred, doubt, despair, and sleepiness, if you observe these conditions as they cease and end, you will attain a kind of calm and mental clarity, which you will never achieve if youre always going after something else.

- Ajahn Sumedho, "The Mind and the Way"

If you can cultivate the right attitude, your enemies are your best spiritual teachers because their presence provides you with the opportunity to enhance and develop tolerance, patience and understanding.


Do not just memorize sayings, recite words, and discuss Zen and the way based on books. The Zen way is not in books. Even if you can recite the teachings of the whole canon and all the masters and philosophers, they are just useless words of no avail when you are facing death.

- Chien-ju


Don't cling to anything and don't reject anything. Let come what comes, and accomodate yourself to that, whatever it is. If good mental images arise, that is fine. If bad mental images arise, that is fine, too. Look on all of it as equal, and make yourself comfortable with whatever happens. Don't fight with what you experience, just observe it all mindfully.

- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, "Mindfulness in Plain English"


Whoever, with a rod, harasses an innocent man, unarmed, quickly falls into any of ten things: harsh pains, devastation, a broken body, grave illness, mental derangement, trouble with the government, violent slander, relatives lost, property dissolved, houses burned down. At the break-up of the body this one with no disconcernment, reappears in hell.

- Dhammapada, 137-140, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu