John MacDonald Quotes

A man should remove not only unnecessary acts, but also unnecessary thoughts, for then superfluous activity will not follow.

Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life.

If you take an hour out of your day to meditate, you will progress ten-fold. By staying mentally focused, you can let your worries go.

Getting things straight in your head is a major achievement because there's so much clutter out there. You've got to push aside the static to really hear the music.

I think meditation has been the single biggest reason for whatever success Ive had

It becomes necessary to learn how to clear the mind of all clouds, to free it of all useless ballast and debris by dismissing the burden of too much concern with material things.

Meditation more than anything in my life was the biggest ingredient of whatever success I've had.

Meditation, more than any other factor, has been the reason for what success I've had.

The degree of freedom from unwanted thoughts and the degree of concentration on a single thought are the measures to gauge spiritual progress.

Concentration is the ability to think about absolutely nothing when it is absolutely necessary.

The mind is a monkey, hopping around from thought to thought, image to image. Rarely do more than a few seconds go by in which the mind can remain single-pointed, empty.

If you're holding onto negative stuff from before, you cannot deliver excellence.

Mindfulness has helped me succeed in almost every dimension of my life. By stopping regularly to look inward and become aware of my mental state, I stay connected to the source of my actions and thoughts and can guide them with considerably more intention.

Meditation is difficult for many people because their thoughts are always on some distant object or place. One form of meditation is to label the thought as it appears and then choose to let it go.

I have always heard that uber-successful people who write books about how to become uber-successful all have one thing in common: They all meditate every day. I consider yoga my meditation.

We are bombarded on all sides by a vast number of messages we don't want or need. More information is generated in a single day than we can absorb in a lifetime. To fully enjoy life, all of us must find our own breathing space and peace of mind.

And I figured out that the reason I couldn't get through the day as well as I can now is because I had too many things on my mind, on my plate, you know, for one person to have. So I started to eliminate some of the things that were too heavy to carry and unnecessary.

One of the secrets of a successful life is to be able to hold all of our energies upon one point, to focus all of the scattered rays of the mind upon one place or thing.

My mind was always very cluttered, so I took great pains to simplify my environment, because if my environment were half as cluttered as my mind, I wouldn't be able to make it from room to room.

If you clear your mind, you can fill it with your character. If it is cluttered, if it is anxious, if you're thinking about your date, about your dinner, about filling your refrigerator, there's no room. There's no room for the character you're trying to build.

If you are humble, your concentration will be very high. That's the way to go in sports.

This is probably an asset that my wife hates, where you compartmentalize. Most times, I think it's an asset, where you can just sort of feel like you chop off one part of your brain to do the next thing that you've got to do.

Racing thoughts was the biggest hurdle to consistent meditation for me. I could sit down, but then I was left with this interior world of thoughts.

Once you clear out from your consciousness things that no longer matter, you're able to make room for other things.

As soon as I finish meditating, I get a beautiful feeling of expanded consciousness. When I'm in this headspace I can make so much progress in my writing.