Jay Griffiths Quotes

How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we're not willing to process deeply?

By making time to read, like making time to love, we expand our time for living.

I'm very emotional. I do feel stuff, for better or worse.

The science of the mind can only have for its proper goal the understanding of human nature by every human being, and through its use, brings peace to every human soul.

Our obsession with speed, with cramming more and more into every minute, means that we race through life instead of actually living it. Our health, diet and relationships suffer. We make mistakes at work. We struggle to relax, to enjoy the moment, even to get a decent night's sleep.

It's my belief that, since the end of the Second World War, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward the important, but not all-important, area of curing mental illness.

There is a huge wave of interest in happiness among researchers. There is a lot of happiness coaching. Everybody would like to make people happier.

My interest in well-being evolved from my interest in decision making - from raising the question of whether people know what they will want in the future and whether the things that people want for themselves will make them happy.

Every five minutes, every hour, every day, every year that you waste worrying about your cancer - you have forfeited time that you could have been alive having fun.

I respect anybody that is very in tune with their feelings.

I don't think that I'm broken at all. I no longer think that I'm a mess. I just think I'm a deeply feeling person in a messy world.

I wondered what it does to each of us to spend the majority of our waking hours doings things we'd rather not do, wishing we were outside or simply elsewhere, wishing we were reading, thinking, making love, fishing, sleeping, or simply having time to figure out who the hell we are and what the hell we're doing.

A very sensitive person in this stupid world is bound to become mad.... Only meditation can save him from becoming mad.

If any of those times you rushed around madly - trying to get somewhere faster - had ever made any real difference in the quality of your life... don't you think you'd be able to slow down by now?

If you didn't have anxiety, then you wouldn't have passion for anything. The reason we have anxiety is because you care and you're thoughtful.

The past is behind, learn from it. The future is ahead, prepare for it. The present is here, live it.

I'm a very sensitive person at times. Not just to words that anybody says, but in relationships for example, the people that you open up to, you listen to, you hear - you know? So a lot of times, the key to some of my vulnerability is just through things, simple things - or critiques or whatever - or could be very simple things that are said.

Too many people, too many demands, too much to do; competent, busy, hurrying people - It just isn't living at all.

Lately you are brooding too much about rights. Give up this dangerous habit.

To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give; no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane.

When we use memories, we are creators. But when our memories use us, we become victims.

Love means the art of being with others. Meditation means the art of being with yourself. Both are two aspects of the same coin.

It is in vain that a man of sound mind and cool temper understands the condition of such a wretched being... He can no more communicate his own wisdom to him than a healthy man can instil his strength into the invalid by whose bedside he is seated.

We are speeding up our lives and working harder in a futile attempt to buy the time to slow down and enjoy it.

I know a lot of people think therapy is about sitting around staring at your own navel - but it's staring at your own navel with a goal. And the goal is to one day to see the world in a better way and treat your loved ones with more kindness and have more to give.