Below are some of my favorite quotes about meditation and mindfulness that can change your life.
“We largely become what we pay attention to.We are building our minds in each moment. We’re building habits and desires and worries and expectations and prejudices and insights. And mindfulness is just the ability to notice this process with clarity and to then prioritize what you pay attention to.”- Sam Harris
“The great gift of a spiritual path is coming to trust that you can find a way to true refuge. You realize that you can start right where you are, in the midst of your life, and find peace in any circumstance. Even at those moments when the ground shakes terribly beneath you—when there’s a loss that will alter your life forever—you can still trust that you will find your way home. This is possible because you’ve touched the timeless love and awareness that are intrinsic to who you are.” —Tara Brach
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Victor Frankl
“If you miss the present moment, you miss your appointment with life. That is very serious!” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.” – Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Mindfulness is simply being aware of what is happening right now without wishing it were different; enjoying the pleasant without holding on when it changes (which it will); being with the unpleasant without fearing it will always be this way (which it won’t).” -James Baraz
“Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience. It isn’t more complicated than that. It is opening to or receiving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it.” ~ Sylvia Boorstein
“Practice sharing the fullness of your being, your best self, your enthusiasm, your vitality, your spirit, 
your trust, your openness, above all, your presence. Share it with yourself, with your family, with the world.” ―Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” – Pema Chödrön
”In today’s rush, we all think too much–seek too much—want too much–and forget about the joy of just being.” – Eckhart Tolle
“Don’t let people pull you into their storm. Pull them into your peace.” – Pema Chödrön
“This very moment is the perfect teacher.” – Pema Chödrön
“Nothing is merely a means to an end, nothing is merely a step on the path to somewhere else. Every moment, everything, is absolutely foundational in its own right.” – Barry Magid
“The thing about meditation is you become more and more you.” ~ David Lynch
“At the end of the day, I can end up just totally wacky, because I’ve made mountains out of molehills. With meditation, I can keep them as molehills.” ~Ringo Starr
“When your attention moves into the Now, there is an alertness. It is as if you were waking up from a dream, the dream of thought, the dream of past and future. Such clarity, such simplicity. No room for problem-making. Just this moment as it is.” ~Eckhart Tolle
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”― Pema Chödrön
“The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves.” – Pema Chödrön
“If you don’t have garbage, you have nothing to use in order to make compost. And if you have no compost, you have nothing to nourish the flower in you. You need the suffering, the afflictions in you. Since they are organic, you know that you can transform them and make good use of them.”—Thich Nhat Hanh
“Self-care is never a selfish act – it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer others. Anytime we can listen to true self and give the care it requires, we do it not only for ourselves, but for the many others whose lives we touch.” – Parker Palmer
“Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose” ―Eckhart Tolle
“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but thought about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral. It is as it is.” ―Eckhart Tolle
“Pain is inevitable; lives come with pain. Suffering is not inevitable. If suffering is what happens when we struggle with our experience because of our inability to accept it, then suffering is an optional extra.” ―Sylvia Boorstein
“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” – Joseph Campbell
“I am all of the above. I am my gifts and my strengths and my light. I am also my weaknesses and my liabilities. I am my darkness and I’m not ashamed of an ounce of it. What you see is what you get.“—Parker Palmer
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” – James Baldwin
“Gratitude turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity…it makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” – Melody Beattie
“May the sun bring you new energy by day, may the moon softly restore you by night, may the rain wash away your worries, may the breeze blow new strength into your being, may you walk gently through the world and know it’s beauty all the days of your life.” – Apache Blessing
“I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
“If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.”— Will Rogers
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” – Albert Camus
“If you are resisting something, you are feeding it. Any energy you fight, you are feeding. If you are pushing something away, you are inviting it to stay.” – Michael Singer
“We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have,
but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.”- Frederick Keonig
“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” – C.S. Lewis
“When you know how to touch the present moment deeply, you touch eternity. You touch the past, and you touch the future” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“The mind is everything. What you think you become.” – Buddha
“The future is always beginning now.” – Mark Strand
“We have to walk in a way that we only print peace and serenity on the Earth. Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” – Unknown
“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”– John Muir
“The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.” ― Brené Brown
“If you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.” – Tibetan saying
“When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.” — Dalai Lama
“The greatest communication is usually how we are rather than what we say.” – Joseph Goldstein
“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.” – Henry Miller
“Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.” – Ernest Holmes
There are two gifts we should give our children: one is roots, the other is wings.” – Hodding Carter
“Better to stand in awe of what people have to hold rather than in judgment in how they carry it.”
– Pema Chodron
“I know but one freedom and that is the freedom of the mind.”- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“Mindfulness meditation doesn’t change life. Life remains as fragile and unpredictable as ever. Meditation changes the heart’s capacity to accept life as it is.” ~ Sylvia Boorstein
“Seeing something wondrous—a child’s smile, a huge wave crashing on the shore, a giant tree swaying in the wind, a starlit sky—inspires awe, the emotion that lets us know that the world is larger than the little story we’re telling ourselves in any moment.” – Frank Ostaseski
“Walk yourself back to yourself.” – Rupert Spira
“Stress is caused by being here, but wanting to be there.” – Eckhart Tolle
“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.” – Pema Chodron
“In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”- Pico Iyer
“In this moment, there is plenty of time. In this moment, you are precisely as you should be. In this moment, there is infinite possibility.”―Victoria Moran
“Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves – slowly, 
evenly, without rushing toward the future; live the actual moment. Only this moment is life.” – Thich Nhat Hanh”
“’Finding yourself’ is not really how it works. You aren’t a ten-dollar bill in last winter’s coat pocket. You are also not lost. Your true self is right here, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. ‘Finding yourself’ is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.” – Emily McDowell
“Don’t meditate to fix yourself, to heal yourself, to improve yourself, to redeem yourself; rather, do it as an act of love, of deep warm friendship to yourself. In this way there is no longer any need for the subtle aggression of self-improvement, for the endless guilt of not doing enough. It offers the possibility of an end to the ceaseless round of trying so hard that wraps so many people’s lives in a knot. Instead there is now meditation as an act of love. How endlessly delightful and encouraging.” – Bob Sharples
“We seek outside the wonders we carry inside us.” – Rumi
“Remind yourself that you cannot fail at being yourself.” ―Wayne W. Dyer
“Life is amazing. And then it’s awful. And then it’s amazing again. And in between the amazing and awful, it’s ordinary and mundane and routine. Breathe in the amazing, hold on through the awful, and relax and exhale during the ordinary. That’s just living heartbreaking, soul healing, amazing, awful, ordinary life. And it’s breathtakingly beautiful.” – L.R. Knost
“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.” ―Brené Brown
“Mr Duffy lived a short distance from his body.” – James Joyce
“Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”- Winnie the Pooh
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” – Confucius
Cheryl Vigder Brause is a mindfulness teacher, speaker, writer, mother of three, and the co-founder of Pause to be Present.