Mark Epstein Quotes

26 quotes in 560 categories

• Uncovering your real desires can be terrifying. It can also set you spectacularly free.
• While the primary function of formal Buddhist meditation is to create the possibility of the experience of "being," my work as a therapist has shown…
• Buddhism teaches us that happiness does not come from any kind of acquisitiveness, be it material or psychological. Happiness comes from letting go. In Buddhism,…
• When we seek happiness through accumulation, either outside of ourselves-from other people, relationships, or material goods-or from our own self-development, we are missing the essential…
• Desire is a teacher: When we immerse ourselves in it without guilt, shame, or clinging, it can show us something special about our own minds…
• If things do not exist as fixed, independent entities, then how can they die? Our notion of death as the sudden expiration of that which…
• To be free, to come to terms with our lives, we have to have a direct experience of ourselves as we really are, warts and…
• To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.
• In building a path through the self to the far shore of awareness, we have to carefully pick our way through our own wilderness. If…
• The picture we present to ourselves of who we think we ought to be obscures who we really are.
• Depressed people think they know themselves, but maybe they only know depression.
• We are looking for a way to feel more real, but we do not realize that to feel more real we have to push ourselves…
• As my Buddhist teachers have shown me, wisdom emerges in the space around words as much as from language itself.
• It’s one of my theories that when people give you advice, they’re really just talking to themselves in the past.
• If aspects of the person remain undigested-cut off, denied, projected, rejected, indulged, or otherwise unassimilated-they become the points around which the core forces of greed,…
• Trauma never goes away completely, it changes perhaps, softens some with time, but never completely goes away.
• It is exceedingly difficult to maintain a sense of absence without turning that absence into some kind of presence
• The willingness to face traumas - be they large, small, primitive or fresh - is the key to healing from them. They may never disappear…
• One of the age-old truths about love is that while it offers unparalleled opportunities for union and the lifting of ego boundaries, it also washes…
• I have come to see that our problem is that we don't know what happiness is. We confuse it with a life uncluttered by feelings…

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