Best Taoism Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 2

“liberation is not revolution. It is not going out of one's way to disturb the social order by casting doubt upon the conventional ideas by which people hold together. [...] To disabuse oneself of accepted mythologies without becoming the victim of other people's anxiety requires considerable tact.”

Zen Taoism

Book:psychotherapy east and west

Source: psychotherapy east and west

“Under any civilized conditions it is, of course, impossible for anyone to act without laying plans, or to refuse absolutely to participate in an economy of waste and violence, [...]. It is, however, possible to see that this competitive "rat race" need not be taken seriously, or rather, that if we are to persist in it at all it must not be taken seriously unless "nervous breakdowns are to become as common as colds”

Zen Taoism

Book:psychotherapy east and west

Source: psychotherapy east and west

“Whenever a tradition becomes venerable with the passage of time, the ancient masters and sages are elevated to pedestals of sanctity and wisdom which lift them far above the human level. The way of liberation becomes confused with a popular cult; the ancient teachers become gods and supermen, and thus the ideal of liberation or Buddha-hood becomes ever more remote. No one believes that it can be reached except by the most gifted and heroic prodigies. Consequently the medicine of the discipline becomes a diet, the cure an addiction, and the raft a houseboat. In this manner, a way of liberation turns into just another social institution and dies of respectability.”

Zen Taoism

Book:psychotherapy east and west

Source: psychotherapy east and west

“Taoism is a way of liberation, which never comes by means of revolution, since it is notorious that most revolutions establish worse tyrannies than they destroy.”

Buddhism Zen Taoism

Author:Alan Watts

“When you change the way you feel, it changes the way you think. When you change the way you think, you change the way you deal with everything in life.”

“The expensive car you bought doesn’t matter, but the way you treated the salesman did.”

Source: Enriched Heart: The Tao of Balancing Your Big, Beautiful, Badass Soul

“Dwelling on the past is like dragging a boat over dry land.”

Source: Enriched Heart: The Tao of Balancing Your Big, Beautiful, Badass Soul

“Taoism is simply the complete acceptance of yourself as you are right in this moment. It's about rolling with the changes, whether they are perceived as good or bad. Tao reminds us to live life through good actions (important for past karma and karma you are presently creating); through practicing things that engage our mind, body, and spirit.”

Source: Enriched Heart: The Tao of Balancing Your Big, Beautiful, Badass Soul

“Sometimes you’re going to shine like the sun; sometimes you’re going to crumble to pieces. Either way, it’s okay.”

Source: Enriched Heart: The Tao of Balancing Your Big, Beautiful, Badass Soul

“You know that you won’t remain Centered all the time, and it is a normal part of human life to drift left or right of Center sometimes.”

“You have the power to change the happiness level in someone’s life and in the process you change your mind-set and the level of your own happiness. Practicing kindness and compassion will change your life, your environment, your outlook on your future, and how you view what has happened in your past.”

Source: Enriched Heart: The Tao of Balancing Your Big, Beautiful, Badass Soul

“Everything is in the root. If you pick the weed without getting the root out of the soil, be assured, it is going to grow back.”

“It’s about letting yourself feel, but not wallow; it’s about leaning into love, not fear, as the preferred force in your life.”

Source: Enriched Heart: The Tao of Balancing Your Big, Beautiful, Badass Soul

“When the ego is in the driver’s seat, we judge. When our spirit, our authentic self, is in control, we practice listening (without judging), compassion, and love”

Source: Enriched Heart: The Tao of Balancing Your Big, Beautiful, Badass Soul

“The expensive car you bought doesn’t matter, but the way you treated the sales man did.”

“When I think of Tao, I think of the artist Bob Ross and his famous painting techniques. I can hear him say, “It’s your tree, you can make it look any way you want to.”

“Life is an all-encompassing art gallery. From the seasons ushering in change to the way a body moves during dance; from the way one smile paints another to the waddle of a street rat – every facet of life is art in motion. Every time a bird takes flight from a branch the scene changes; each time the winds shift brings new perspective.”

“Recovery through sleep isn’t going to happen if the majority of the components of your being aren’t getting enough stimulation or resistance to work against. Your brain may be tired after work, but if your body and emotions haven’t been challenged through the day, they’re going to keep irritating you even if you’re asleep. They don’t need rest; they need work for real recovery to take place.”

Source: Re:

“Well-being, or wholeness, implies integrity and harmony between all existing elements, providing freedom for the whole.”

Source: Re:

“In my experience, most people are actually seeking recovery from the monotony and anxiety of qualitative repetition. This applies to body, emotions and mind. And that monotony and anxiety involves inertia just as much as over-use, meaning inertia in some areas and over-use in others.”

Source: Re:

“Physical well-being necessitates listening to what you already know, and then taking it seriously enough to act accordingly. When you wake up and feel the impulse to arch your back, stretch and exhale with a loud sigh, for God’s sake, do it.”

Source: Re:

“People generally believe that stress is responsible for depletion, but apathy and uninspired systematic repetition are equally responsible. Or rather, systematic repetition produces as much or more stress and anxiety as anything else.”

Source: Re:

“If you’re ignoring a high percentage of the elements of your entire being, and the range of qualities they can naturally engage, there will be no real recovery or progress until you do. The typical relentless worker is just as lazy as the typical indulgent idler; they’re both just going through the habitual motions. To break the repetitive pattern, and discover more energy and effectiveness, one simply must stretch out in all directions, rotating focus and application of the qualities that make up one’s natural versatility.”

Source: Re:

“I look at the idea of rest as rotating one’s qualitative focus, not just doing less or changing activity. The role of rest is recovery. If you keep pushing the same quality button (fast or slow, concentrated or dispersed, hard-working or lazy…) for the same component all the time, of course it’s going to become depleted, just like if you keep working a single muscle in the same fashion or don’t use it at all.”

Source: Re:

“Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you.”

Source: Re:

“If one follows what is in one’s heart (let’s leave out mind for the moment), one ends up with what one truly values and loves in life—and one acts accordingly. One’s own private indulgent cyclic habitual reactive subjective transitory feelings are, hopefully, not at the head of that list.”

Source: Re:

“The typical image of a depressed, lazy and tired person is someone hunched over and inert. Often, the assumption is that if one had more enthusiasm and inspiration, he would then stand up straight and move. In many cases, this equation is backward. But, as with everything related to one’s physicality, balance is the key. An overly erect and rigid posture may convey confidence and power to some, but it also causes a subtle accumulation of tension and rigidity on various levels, including psychological and emotional.”

Source: Re:

“Everyone claims to want the truth. If you really want it, I’d suggest investing seriously in humor and this mysterious skill of transforming bad news into good. Otherwise, you’ll only get more frustrated.”

Source: Re:

“Ironically, many of the institutions that run the economy, such as medicine, education, law and even psychology are largely dependent upon failing health. If you add up the amounts of money exchanged in the control, anticipation and reaction to failing health (insurance, pharmaceutical research and products, reactive or compensatory medicine, related legal issues, consultation and therapy for those who are unwilling to improve their physical health and claim or believe the problem is elsewhere, etc.), you end up with an enormous chunk. To keep that moving, we need people to be sick. Then we have the extreme social emphasis placed on the pursuit and maintenance of a lifestyle based on making money at any cost, often at the sacrifice of health, sanity and well-being.”

Source: Re:

“No one will improve his health significantly without accurately perceiving priorities, knowing clearly what is at stake if those are not attended to and what is to be gained if acted on correctly. That’s the basic homework before any change can come about. Then that knowledge has to be transformed into a sustainable motivation.”

Source: Re:

“Appreciation, affection, focus and intention fill up the space of self-reflection, and one loses oneself in the engagement. And what a relief it is when you get there.”

Source: Re:

“If you, one, loves something or someone, that means that one is willing to, and does, sacrifice for it. That is, one chooses to do and give what is better to the being or thing one loves than to sacrifice the loved one for the personal emotion that is unrelated to or even hinders the giving. In other words, the way to transform an emotion is with a deeper one. This involves discernment and, yes, discipline, which are both frowned upon and seen as emotionless and less important. Which is immaturity, plain and simple, and is the fundamental aspect of human growth from child to adolescence to adult.”

Source: Re:

“Yearning often does not provide a sense of attainment or “peace,” as it is fuel for one’s personal purpose, to in some specific way give or create; to do that is not necessarily easy or peaceful.”

Source: Re:

“It’s highly refined stuff—holding to one’s purpose and focus, but also intuiting the value of being a piece in a larger design and evolution. The balance between these two rhythms is where and when true harmony is achieved and magic happens. Often, just the release of the obsession for personal preferences and to personally gain opens the door.”

Source: Re:

“If I were to make a list of focus for well-being, I would begin with lifestyle (the totality of one’s circumstance and how that is engaged, including job and relationships, and proximity to nature), attending to the physical functions correctly (posture, breathing, exercise, food, rest, etc.), consistent expression of your natural range of qualities, working and playing well and hard, and designing things so that you are doing what compels you. Obviously, you can’t give this list out as a prescription for physical problems and diseases, but then again, it is probably the correct prescription. If one were to follow it, any specific problem, even extreme, would almost certainly resolve itself.”

Source: Re:

“Getting down to the gym a couple days a week and having low-fat milk in your morning latte isn’t going to make much of a dent in a system or lifestyle that is essentially, well, unwell.”

Source: Re:

“The essential dynamic underlying almost every elite and esoteric physical art is work with the breath, so there’s information available. I would only add that it’s unfortunate that so much work is done with it, and not much play. Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you. I’ve mentioned before that one good measure of someone’s depth of spirituality is how long it takes before they become offended. Imagine laughing hysterically at the criticisms, complaints and impositions you receive. At the least, you’d be breathing well.”

Source: Re:

“As we move through time, we age, with the general speed of everything and the chaos that that produces in us in the form of anxiety, fear, confusion and negotiating an already-existing war, there is little time and space left to adjust to our developing relationship to yearning. In other words, as our needs are met, the question answered, we don’t then move on to the next question.”

Source: Re:

“The experience of frustration comes from the separation we impose between our yearning and our fear. Generally, we yearn for that which we fear, or at least fear the unknown (mystery, and therefore and paradoxically, truth) that will be caused through the pursuit of yearning. The more the separation between these two, yearning and fear, the more frustration if you are conscious, or the more neurosis if you are not (literally, “I can’t stand the frustration, I’m going crazy”).”

Source: Re:

“The depth and complexity of the questions we’ve recently been engaging tend to ignite associated questions very quickly. The family members of these subjects—purpose, responsibility, devotion, commitment, trust, yearning—and their neighbors—frustration, jealousy, ambition, sloth, etc.—get all excited and have things to say to each other. Because of the pressure and tension between them, one has to negotiate the dialogue carefully and use a lot of patience, tolerance and other unsexy qualities. Otherwise, we’ve got another war on our hands.”

Source: Re:

“Like all things organically formed, there does exist a harmony, interrelated patterns, intuitive logic, and purpose, but these are subtle and you can’t find them exclusively by emotional or intellectual analysis. At first glance it’s all too complex and liquid-like, and our minds and emotions look for control and relief. To know water, you have to get wet; you can’t just sit back and analyze its components. So, do try to enjoy the swim, and don’t be afraid to just sit back and drink now and then—the water’s clean.”

Source: Re:

“Traditionally, true contemplation involves an act of devotion, wherein self-consciousness is removed by transferring consciousness onto the thing at hand. The better you perceive it, the less you observe yourself doing that. In other words, you could say that, at least for the extended moments of engaging it, you love it more than yourself.”

Source: Re:

“On a psychological and physiological level, the habits of contraction are often caused by the desire to control or acquire, even to acquire generosity or devotion or emptiness. These are subtle and take time to identify and release. Under this is the desire for self-gain or improvement, to win something or better something. Those intentions are healthy enough up to a point, but to really see and engage what you have in front of you, you have to intend that it gains or wins.”

Source: Re:

“There is an actual and palpable hierarchy of emotional, mental and physiological intensity that corresponds to the actual capacities and limitations of human beings. In other words, there does exist a real and definable scale of suffering, and of joy.”

Source: Re:

“Although each of us has the right to believe we are suffering, I suppose, there is a definite and ultimately essential distinction to be made between actual suffering, its cause and resolution, and invented or imagined suffering.”

Source: Re:

“The subjective experience of intense pain (“That’s all I can take”) corresponds exactly to one’s subjective experience in relation to truth (“That’s all I can take”).”

Source: Re:

“The transitory and random quality of emotions (“Well, that’s just the way I feel about it”) is deeply connected to, and largely the cause of, random engagement of one’s values and priorities. This very randomness and inconsistency is actually the cause of deeper suffering, primarily through the accumulation of addictions and the indulgence in reactions that are disproportionately small in comparison to what is really being sacrificed for them. Curiously—and a major theme in my own work over decades—the casual association of emotions to love is part of the insanity in all this.”

Source: Re:

“True balance, and harmony, necessitates finding a way to override the addictive, reactive emotions that are the fabric of one’s subjective illusion, and discover emotions that correspond to actuality.”

Source: Re:

“On the high-end spectrum of emotions, which are innately connected to intuition and direct comprehension as well as imagination and creativity, meaning true empathy and knowledge, appreciative realization, transformation and invention, one finds a richer and more voluptuous combination of experience. Unfortunately, to “get there,” one has to be willing to sacrifice what is known for what is not.”

Source: Re:

“The trick is in genuinely appreciating the elements of apparent resistance while you are engaging them. Not to oppose or remove them as much as to creatively fold them into one’s linear line of movement, exploiting them and making the necessary adjustments as you go.”

Source: Re:

Taoism Quotes

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Taoism Quotes