Norman Vincent Peale Quotes

And that works for me. So that if this is it, you better take it at its right proportion. That there are serious things, but most things are temporal and ephemeral, and you should cultivate that attitude. That joy and love and all the verities are what counts. So I try not to take too many things seriously, and if I find myself caught up in the seriousness of the moment, within a period of time, I'm able to cajole myself out of it.

To die every day to every problem, every pleasure, and not carry over any problem at all; so the mind remains tremendously attentive, active, clear.

It's in the silence that your problems just dissolve. Try it. It really works.

Do not struggle against your thoughts; they are stronger than you are. If you want to be free of them, accept them.

It was a hard time for me to have a pure moment, to be present, to be here.

I am a lover of what is, not because I'm a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality.

Chill out, relax and have an open mind.

I've spent most of my life trying to think my way to happiness, and my failure to achieve that goal only proves, in my mind, that I am not a good enough thinker. It never occurred to me that the source of my unhappiness is not flawed thinking but thinking itself.

Meditation is the only way to freedom from stress as it is a dimension beyond the mind. All the stress and struggle are of the mind.

The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. Zen practice is to open up our small mind.

Meditation is a surrender, it is not a demand. It is not forcing existence your way, it is relaxing into the way existence wants you to be. It is a let-go.

...when you resist what happens, your mind begins to race; the same thoughts that impinge upon you are actually created by you.

The mind which renounces, once and for ever, a futile hope, has its compensation in ever-growing calm.

One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.

The next time you lose heart and you can’t bear to experience what you’re feeling, you might recall this instruction: change the way you see it and lean in. Instead of blaming our discomfort on outer circumstances or on our own weakness, we can choose to stay present and awake to our experience, not rejecting it, not grasping it, not buying the stories that we relentlessly tell ourselves. This is priceless advice that addresses the true cause of suffering—yours, mine, and that of all living beings.

Most people who have a problem concentrate on the problem. They take it to bed with them and stay awake all night thinking it over. Let go of that problem. Rise above it in consciousness.

Resisting what is happening is a major cause of suffering.

Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.

Every night empty your mind of unhappy thoughts as you empty your pockets and come alive.

Meditation really helps create not only a sense of balance... but serenity and kind of a calm state of mind.

Letting go is not the same as aversion, struggling to get rid of something. We cannot genuinely let go of what we resist. What we resist and fear secretly follows us even as we push it away. To let go of fear or trauma, we need to acknowledge just how it is. We need to feel it fully and accept that it is so. It is as it is. Letting go begins with letting be.

The thing to do is to keep your mind when the world around you is losing theirs.

With meditation, you become a sensitized superhero, completely in control, with endless possibilities at your fingertips.

The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. When the mind is perfectly clear, what is is what we want.

When I tried this morning, after an hour or so of unhappy thinking, to dip back into my meditation, I took a new idea with me: compassion. I asked my heart if it could please infuse my soul with a more generous perspective on my mind's workings. Instead of thinking that I was a failure, could I perhaps accept that I am only a human being--and a normal one, at that?