Top 280 Pema Chödrön Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “There is no cultivation of patience when your pattern is to just try to seek harmony and smooth everything out. Patience implies willingness to be alive rather than trying to seek harmony.”

— Pema Chödrön

202. “Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know.”

— Pema Chödrön

203. “Once you create a self-justifying storyline, your emotional entrapment within it quadruples.”

— Pema Chödrön

204. “Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.”

— Pema Chödrön

205. “Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.”

— Pema Chödrön

206. “Searching for happiness prevents us from ever finding it.”

— Pema Chödrön

207. “We spend all our energy and waste our lives trying to re-create these zones of safety, which are always falling apart. That’s the essence of samsara – the cycle of suffering that comes from continuing to seek happiness in all the wrong places.”

— Pema Chödrön

208. “Softening what is rigid in our hearts...”

— Pema Chödrön

209. “We are all capable of becoming fundamentalists because we get addicted to other people’s wrongness.”

— Pema Chödrön

210. “Everything in our lives has the potential to wake us up or put us to sleep. Allowing it to awaken us is up to us.”

— Pema Chödrön

211. “Wholeheartedly do what it takes to awaken your clear-seeing intelligence, but one day at a time, one moment at a time. If we live that way, we will benefit this earth.”

— Pema Chödrön

212. “Patience has nothing to do with suppression. In fact, it has everything to do with a gentle, honest relationship with yourself.”

— Pema Chödrön

213. “In truth, there is enormous space in which to live our everyday lives.”

— Pema Chödrön

214. “The more neurosis the more wisdom.”

— Pema Chödrön

215. “The most heartbreaking thing of all is how we cheat ourselves of the present moment.”

— Pema Chödrön

216. “Patience is the training in abiding with the restlessness of our energy and letting things evolve at their own speed.”

— Pema Chödrön

217. “Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself.”

— Pema Chödrön

218. “It isn’t the things that happen to us in our lives that cause us to suffer, it’s how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.”

— Pema Chödrön

219. “If your mind is expansive and unfettered, you will find yourself in a more accommodating world, a place that’s endlessly interesting and alive. That quality isn’t inherent in the place but in your state of mind.”

— Pema Chödrön

220. “Every moment is incredibly unique and fresh, and when we drop into the moment, as meditation allows us to do, we learn how to truly taste this tender and mysterious life that we share together.”

— Pema Chödrön

221. “It’s helpful to remind yourself that meditation is about opening and relaxing with whatever arises, without picking and choosing.”

— Pema Chödrön

222. “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals.”

— Pema Chödrön

223. “The next step is to learn to communicate with the people that you feel are causing your pain and misery- not to learn how to prove them wrong and yourself right but how to communicate from the heart.”

— Pema Chödrön

224. “Compassion starts with making friends with ourselves.”

— Pema Chödrön

225. “I’m here to tell you that the path to peace is right there, when you want to get away.”

— Pema Chödrön

226. “Words themselves are neutral. It’s the charge we add to them that matters.”

— Pema Chödrön

227. “How will we experience the world a month, a year, or five years from now? Will we be even angrier, more grasping and fearful, or will some shift have occurred? This depends entirely on the tendencies we reinforce today.”

— Pema Chödrön

228. “If you ask why we meditate, I would say it’s so we can become more flexible and tolerant to the present moment.”

— Pema Chödrön

229. “The idea is to develop sympathy for your own confusion.”

— Pema Chödrön

230. “We have two alternatives: either we question our beliefs – or we don’t. Either we accept our fixed versions of reality- or we begin to challenge them. In Buddha’s opinion, to train in staying open and curious – to train in dissolving our assumptions and beliefs – is the best use of our human lives.”

— Pema Chödrön

231. “Meditation isn’t really about getting rid of thoughts, it’s about changing the pattern of grasping on to things, which in our everyday experience is our thoughts.”

— Pema Chödrön

232. “We practice to liberate ourselves from a burden.”

— Pema Chödrön

233. “It becomes increasingly clear that we won’t be free of self-destructive patterns unless we develop a compassionate understanding of what they are.”

— Pema Chödrön

234. “If you’re aggressive in your dealings, that’s how you’ll be regarded in the world. You might smile and give generously, but if you frequently explode in anger, people never feel comfortable in your presence and you’ll never have peace of mind.”

— Pema Chödrön

235. “Holding on to anything blocks wisdom.”

— Pema Chödrön

236. “Buddhism itself is all about empowering yourself, not about getting what you want.”

— Pema Chödrön

237. “While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves.”

— Pema Chödrön

238. “We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be.”

— Pema Chödrön

239. “Everything that human beings feel, we feel. We can become extremely wise and sensitive to all of humanity and the whole universe simply by knowing ourselves, just as we are.”

— Pema Chödrön

240. “Mindfulness is loving all the details of our lives, and awareness is the natural thing that happens: life begins to open up, and you realize that you’re always standing at the center of the world.”

— Pema Chödrön

241. “Opening to the world begins to benefit ourselves and others simultaneously. The more we relate with others, the more quickly we discover where we’re blocked.”

— Pema Chödrön

242. “We’re not trying to be something we aren’t; rather, we’re reconnecting with who we are.”

— Pema Chödrön

243. “Patience takes courage. It is not an ideal state of calm. In fact, when we practice patience we will see our agitation far more clearly.”

— Pema Chödrön

244. “My moods are continuously shifting like the weather.”

— Pema Chödrön

245. “We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment.”

— Pema Chödrön

246. “None of us is ever OK, but we all get through everything just fine.”

— Pema Chödrön

247. “Being satisfied with what we already have is a magical golden key to being alive in a full, unrestricted, and inspired way.”

— Pema Chödrön

248. “If we knew that tonight we were going to go blind, we would take a long, last real look at every blade of grass, every cloud formation, every speck of dust, every rainbow, raindrop-everything.”

— Pema Chödrön

249. “The truth is that good and bad coexist; sour and sweet coexist. They aren’t really opposed to each other.”

— Pema Chödrön

250. “All the wars, all the hatred, all the ignorance in the world come out of being so invested in our opinions.”

— Pema Chödrön