Top 90 Eknath Easwaran Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Nothing really worth having comes quickly and easily. If it did, I doubt that we would ever grow.”

— Eknath Easwaran

2. “A calm mind releases the most precious capacity a human being can have: the capacity to turn anger into compassion, fear into fearlessness, and hatred into love.”

— Eknath Easwaran

3. “The Sufis advise us to speak only after our words have managed to pass through three gates. At the first gate, we ask ourselves, ‘Are these words true?’ If so, we let them pass on; if not, back they go. At the second gate, we ask, ‘Are the necessary?’ At the last gate, we ask, ‘Are they kind?’”

— Eknath Easwaran

4. “Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny private, shell-bound realm – which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world.”

— Eknath Easwaran

5. “As meditation deepens, compulsions, cravings and fits of emotion begin to lose their power to dictate our behavior. We see clearly that choices are possible; we can say yes or we can say no. It is profoundly liberating.”

— Eknath Easwaran

6. “When we truly are putting others first, we cannot but feel at peace with ourselves.”

— Eknath Easwaran

7. “This is the central principle of meditation: we become what we meditate on.”

— Eknath Easwaran

8. “Today, everything I do from morning meditation on – eating breakfast, going for a walk, writing, reading, even recreation – is governed by one purpose only: how to give the very best account of my life that I can in the service of all.”

— Eknath Easwaran

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9. “It is not action or effort that we must surrender; it is self-will, and this is terribly difficult. You must do your best constantly, yet never allow yourself to become involved in whether things work out the way you want.”

— Eknath Easwaran

10. “Eventually, meditation will make our mind calm, clear, and as concentrated as a laser which we can focus at will. This capacity of one-pointed attention is the essence of genius. When we have this mastery over attention in everything we do, we have a genius for life.”

— Eknath Easwaran

11. “God made the senses turn outwards, man therefore looks outwards, not into himself. But occasionally a daring soul, desiring immortality, has looked back and found himself.”

— Eknath Easwaran

12. “Patience can’t be acquired overnight. It is just like building up a muscle. Every day you need to work on it.”

— Eknath Easwaran

13. “When we meditate every morning we are putting on armor for the day’s battle against our own impatience, inadequacy, resentment, and hostility.”

— Eknath Easwaran

14. “Having come to realize in the first stage of meditation that we are not our bodies, in the second stage we make an even more astounding discovery; we are not our minds either.”

— Eknath Easwaran

15. “In the spiritual lore of India there is a story that the Lord whispered only one word in our ears when he sent us into the world: ‘Give.’ Give freely of your time, your talent, your resources; give without asking for anything in return. This is the secret of living in joy and security.”

— Eknath Easwaran

16. “Don’t try to control the future,” he would say. “Work on the one thing you can learn to control: your own responses.”

— Eknath Easwaran

17. “We can all avoid travel that is unnecessary; we do not need to travel around the world when the source of all joy and all beauty is right within us.”

— Eknath Easwaran

18. “We have to have a purpose greater than the endless struggle to satisfy personal desires.”

— Eknath Easwaran

19. “The goal of meditation is awareness, not relaxation.”

— Eknath Easwaran

20. “Live only for yourself and you will never grow; live for the welfare of all those around you and you will grow to your full stature.”

— Eknath Easwaran

21. “When we go slower, we are more patient and when we are more patient we have a choice in how we respond.”

— Eknath Easwaran

22. “I like to remind my friends frequently how short life is. This is the important message of death: not a day to waste, not a day to quarrel, not a day to brood upon yourself. This is not losing the joy of life; this is gaining the joy of life.”

— Eknath Easwaran

23. “When we are at home with ourselves, we are at home everywhere in the world. When we have found peace within ourselves, peace and love follow us wherever we go.”

— Eknath Easwaran

24. “The real essentials of life – compassion, kindness, good will, forgiveness – are what is fundamental to living as a true human being.”

— Eknath Easwaran

25. “Through meditation and by giving full attention to one thing at a time, we can learn to direct attention where we choose.”

— Eknath Easwaran

26. “As we get deeper, we move closer and closer to other people; we feel closer to life as a whole.”

— Eknath Easwaran

27. “When the mind is still, we can become an instrument of peace.”

— Eknath Easwaran

28. “Don’t think the purpose of meditation is to go deep into consciousness, wrap a blanket around yourself, and say, ‘How cozy! I’m going to curl up in here by myself; let the world burn.’ Not at all. We go deep into meditation so that we can reach out further and further to the world outside.”

— Eknath Easwaran

29. “Lasting change happens when people see for themselves that a different way of life is more fulfilling than their present one.”

— Eknath Easwaran

30. “Make wise choices about what you read. Read only what is necessary or worthwhile. And then take the time to read carefully. One book read with concentration and reflected upon is worth a hundred flashed through without any absorption at all.”

— Eknath Easwaran

31. “Love is so exquisitely elusive. It cannot be bought, cannot be badgered, cannot be hijacked. It is available only in one rare form: as the natural response of a healthy mind and healthy heart.”

— Eknath Easwaran

32. “There is a tale of a man who found on the road a large stone bearing the words, “Under me lies a great truth.” The man strained to turn the stone over and finally succeeded. On the bottom was written, “Why do you want a new truth when you do not practice what you already know?”

— Eknath Easwaran

33. “We ourselves are responsible for what happens to us, whether or not we can understand how. It follows that we can change what happens to us by changing ourselves; we can take our destiny into our own hands.”

— Eknath Easwaran

34. “People say that modern life has grown so complicated, so busy, so crowded that we have to hurry even to survive. We need not accept that idea. It is quite possible to live in the midst of a highly developed technological society and keep an easy, relaxed pace while doing a lot of hard work. We have a choice.”

— Eknath Easwaran

35. “We look at the world through our likes and dislikes, hopes and fears, opinions and judgments. We want everyone to behave as we think they should; otherwise we get agitated. But we are here to accept the world as it is, even as we work to make it better.”

— Eknath Easwaran

36. “Whatever we have done, we can always make amends for it without ever looking back in guilt or sorrow.”

— Eknath Easwaran

37. “Imagine a hot tub for the mind. That is what meditation is; it can bathe your mind in relaxing thoughts.”

— Eknath Easwaran

38. “Human relationships are the perfect tool for sanding away our rough edges and getting at the core of divinity within us.”

— Eknath Easwaran

39. “Activity is not achievement. It is not enough to rush about beginning a lot of things and keeping busy. A well-spent life is one that rounds out what it has begun.”

— Eknath Easwaran

40. “Every angry thought makes it a little easier to get angry the next time, and a little more likely.”

— Eknath Easwaran

41. “The capacity to be patient, to bear with others through thick and thin, is within the reach of anyone.”

— Eknath Easwaran

42. “When someone at peace and free from hurry enters a room, that person has a calming effect on everyone present.”

— Eknath Easwaran

43. “I have never been able to understand the compelling phrase, ‘keeping up with the Joneses.’ It does not matter very much whether I keep up with Tom Jones or anybody else; what is important is to keep up with myself by making my today a little better than my yesterday.”

— Eknath Easwaran

44. “The things we think about, brood on, dwell on, and exult over influence our life in a thousand ways. When we can actually choose the direction of our thoughts instead of just letting them run along the grooves of conditioned thinking, we become the masters of our own lives.”

— Eknath Easwaran

45. “Everything beautiful has to be worked for.”

— Eknath Easwaran

46. “People who have strong likes and dislikes find life very difficult; they are as rigid as if they had only one bone.”

— Eknath Easwaran

47. “I am time, the destroyer of all; I have come to consume the world.”

— Eknath Easwaran

48. “The Lord is a good psychologist: he knows the way our minds run. Turmoil can be the Lord’s way of tapping us on the shoulder and saying, ‘Don’t forget me.’”

— Eknath Easwaran

49. “We can all learn to conquer hatred through love -drawing on the power released through the practice of meditation to throw all our weight, all our energy, and all our will on the side of what is patient, forgiving, and selfless in ourselves and others.”

— Eknath Easwaran

50. “International war is the sum total of millions of individual wars, raging in the minds of the people, between what is selfish and what is selfless. To the extent that you and I develop selflessness in our own hearts, to that extent we contribute to peace in our family, community, country, and world.”

— Eknath Easwaran