George Harrison Quotes

The sage desires no desire, does not value rare treasures, learns without learning, recovers what people have left behind.

I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.

I think it's just recognizing that who you are is not any of the stuff that you have. It's not any of the things of the ego. Coming to that awareness is a very hard thing for most people to do - but that's an excuse. If you tell yourself it's too hard, then you won't take it on. But right now, for most people, it's almost an impossibility to do so, because they're so attached to "I am what I have"; "I am what I do"; "I am what my reputation is"; or "I am all of this material stuff."

Enlightenment is always through surrender, but surrender is achieved through intelligence. Only idiots cannot surrender. To surrender you need great intelligence. To see the point of surrender is the climax of insight; to see the point that you are not separate from existence is the highest that intelligence can give to you.

I get sent Bibles. I have a collection of about 20 in my room. People think I need to be guided.

(After death.) So few people who come across, possess awareness of any kind. All they bring along with them are worthless values. All they desire is continuation of what they had in life no matter how misguided or degraded. . . Will those people ever progress, even with our help?

Self-realization may be and sometimes is attained even by people who are struggling with sick and otherwise imperfect bodies; but it cannot be attained unless one can concentrate and meditate uninterruptedly upon God.

For years I taught in universities and high schools for classes of 30 or 35 students. Now I teach in very large venues with thousands of people in the audience. I used to have notes. Now I just let go and let God. I just allow it to come, and I didn't do that before. I never even used the word "God" for twenty or twenty-five years. Now it just rolls out of my mouth all the time.

I'd rather be one of the devotees of God than one of the straight, so-called sane or normal people who just don't understand that man is a spiritual being, that he has a soul.

For understanding in spiritual matters, the golden rule is not intellect but obedience.

Intelligence, that sublimation of the sensibility, that organ of the need to know, is sterilized sensibility.

Vipassana is fine until it becomes a technique that has many stages and that takes time to develop. That can be okay for people for a while, but then you have to leave the technique behind.

To attain Buddhahood ... we must scatter this life's aims and objects to the wind.

Since man's highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most.

When you climb a ladder and arrive on the sixth step and you think that is the highest, then you cannot come to the seventh. So the technique is to abandon the sixth in order for the seventh step to be possible. And this is our practice, to release our views. The practice of nonattachment to views is at the heart of the Buddhist practice of meditation.

Forgiveness means that I continually am willing to forgive the other person for not being God — for not fulfilling all my needs. I, too, must ask forgiveness for not being able to fulfill other people's needs. … The interesting thing is that when you can forgive people for not being God, then you can celebrate that they are a reflection of God.

My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism

An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people-it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation, to ease the burden of the mystery.

The mass of people who are Bible-taught never get free from the erroneous impressions stamped on their minds in their infancy, so that their manhood or womanhood can have no intellectual fulfillment, and millions of them only attain mentally to a sort of second childhood

The Master was exceedingly gracious to university dons who visited him, but he would never reply to their questions or be drawn into their theological speculations. To his disciples, who marveled at this, he said, "Can one talk about the ocean to a frog in a well or about the divine to people who are restricted by their concepts?

One must lose one's life to find it.

Healthy mysticism praises acts of letting go, of being emptied, of getting in touch with the space inside and expanding this until it merges with the space outside. Space meeting space; empty pouring into empty. Births happen from that encounter with emptiness, nothingness. . . . Let us not fight emptiness and nothingness, but allow it to penetrate us even as we penetrate it.

Forgiveness is man's deepest need and highest achievement.

I notice that when I feel the most disconnected, once I'm done blaming the moon and everything else, I can see that I am so mired in identification with form and ego and story and identity, and that if I want to, I can read some scripture or read some spiritual book or pray or meditate or sit in the sun or hang around the birds and the dogs, and get a real objective sense of what's really going on here. That usually softens things.

All you need to find and accomplish God's purpose in your life is God's permission and approval--not anyone else's. When you get in step with Him, there will be a glow on your face that will make people wonder what you're up to.