Mark Epstein Quotes

After five minutes, or ten, or fifteen - it doesn't matter - open your eyes and resume your day. For a moment or two things might seem more alive.

Love is the revelation of the other person's freedom,

To free desire from the tendency to cling, we have to be willing to stumble over ourselves.

It is exceedingly difficult to maintain a sense of absence without turning that absence into some kind of presence

Uncovering your real desires can be terrifying. It can also set you spectacularly free.

Meditation is not a means of forgetting the ego; it is a method of using the ego to observe and tame its own manifestations.

Depressed people think they know themselves, but maybe they only know depression.

We are what we think, having become what we thought.

The only way to find out where I was was to get out of the way and let myself happen.

As my Buddhist teachers have shown me, wisdom emerges in the space around words as much as from language itself.

Enlightenment does not mean getting rid of anything. It means changing one's frame of reference so that all things become enlightening.

Awakening does not mean a change in difficulty, it means a change in how those difficulties are met.

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 further into the unknown.

The spiritual path means making a path rather than following one.

Trauma never goes away completely, it changes perhaps, softens some with time, but never completely goes away.

Stillness does not mean the elimination of disturbances as much as a different way of viewing them.

Intimacy puts us in touch with fragility, he realized, and the acceptance of fragility opens us to intimacy.

Completion comes not from adding another piece to ourselves but from surrendering our ideas of perfection.

Anger is sign that something needs to change.

The central premise of this book is that the Western psychological notion of what it means to have a self is flawed.

The Way Out Is Through

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 all.

The picture we present to ourselves of who we think we ought to be obscures who we really are.