Top 120 Sogyal Rinpoche Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth. Real devotion is rooted in an awed and reverent gratitude, but one that is lucid, grounded, and intelligent.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

52. “Our task is to strike a balance, to find a middle way, to learn not to overextend ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations, but to simplify our lives more and more. The key to finding a happy balance in modern life is simplicity.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

53. “Whatever you do, don’t shut off your pain. Accept your pain and remain vulnerable. However desperate you become, don’t shut off your pain because it is in fact trying to hand you a precious gift – the chance of discovery through spiritual practice, what lies behind sorrow. And don’t we know and only far too well, that protection from pain doesn’t work. And when we try and defend ourselves from suffering, we only suffer more and don’t learn what we can from experience.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

54. “Don’t get too excited. In the end, it’s neither good nor bad.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

55. “This world can seem marvellously convincing until death collapses the illusion and evicts us from our hiding place. What will happen to us then if we have no clue of any deeper reality?”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

56. “It is compassion, then, that is the best protection; it is also, as the great masters of the past have always known, the source of all healing.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

57. “Saints and mystics throughout history have adorned their realisations with different names and given them different faces and interpretations, but what they are all fundamentally experiencing is the essential nature of the mind.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

58. “Real devotion is an unbroken receptivity to the truth.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

59. “Sometimes I think the greatest achievement of modern culture its its brilliant selling of samsara and its barren distractions. Modern society seems to me a celebration of all the things that lead away from the truth, make truth hard to live for, and discourage people from even believing that it exists.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

60. “Everything can be used as an invitation to meditation.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

61. “More important than finding the teacher is finding and following the truth of the teaching...”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

62. “Even though the meditator may leave the meditation, the meditation will not leave the meditator.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

63. “Life and death are in the mind, and nowhere else.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

64. “Tibetan thangka paintings and derive strength from their beauty.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

65. “Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, calculating – the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to – you have uncovered in yourself your own wise guide.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

66. “Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

67. “The nature of everything is illusory and ephemeral, Those with dualistic perception regard suffering as happiness, Like they who lick the honey from a razor’s edge. How pitiful they who cling strongly to concrete reality: Turn your attention within, my heart friends.5.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

68. “There is only one law in the universe that never changes – that all things change, and that all things are impermanent.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

69. “What the world needs more than anything are Bodhisattvas of peace, lawyers, politicians, teachers working tirelessly for the enlightenment of themselves and others.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

70. “Our lives are lived in intense and anxious struggle, in a swirl of speed and aggression, in competing, grasping, possessing and achieving, forever burdening ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

71. “Why exactly are we so frightened of death that we avoid looking at it altogether? Somewhere, deep down, we know we cannot avoid facing death forever. We know, in Milarepa’s words: “This thing called ‘corpse’ we dread so much is living with us here and now.””

— Sogyal Rinpoche

72. “So one moment you have lost something precious, and then, in the very next moment, you find your mind is resting in a deep state of peace.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

73. “Don’t you notice that there are particular moments when you are naturally inspired to introspection? Work with them gently, for these are the moments when you can go through a powerful experience, and your whole worldview can change quickly.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

74. “Theories are like patches on a coat, one day they just wear off.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

75. “Generally we waste our lives, distracted from our true selves, in endless activity. Meditation is the way to bring us back to ourselves, where we can really experience and taste our full being.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

76. “Why, if we are as pragmatic as we claim, don’t we begin to ask ourselves seriously: Where does our real future lie?”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

77. “Nothing could be further from the truth. But in a world dedicated to distraction, silence and stillness terrify us; we protect ourselves from them with noise and frantic busyness. Looking into the nature of our mind is the last thing we would dare to do. Sometimes I think we don’t want to.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

78. “The masters say if you create an auspicious condition in your body and your environment then meditation and realization will automatically arise.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

79. “Every subatomic interaction consists of the annihilation of the original particles and the creation of new subatomic particles. The subatomic world is a continual dance of creation and annihilation, of mass changing into energy and energy changing to mass. Transient forms sparkle in and out of existence, creating a never-ending, forever newly created reality.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

80. “The still revolutionary insight of Buddhism is that life and death are in the mind, and nowhere else. Mind is revealed as the universal basis of experience – the creator of happiness and the creator of suffering, the creator of what we call life and what we call death.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

81. “Yet is our deepest desire is truly to live and go on living, why do we blindly insist that death is the end? Why not at least try and explore the possibility that there may be a life after?”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

82. “People will die as they have lived, as themselves.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

83. “Wrong views and wrong convictions can be the most devastating of all our delusions. Surely both Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot must have been convinced that they were right? And yet each and every one of us has that same dangerous tendency as they had: to form convictions, believe them without question and act on them, so bringing down suffering not only on ourselves, but also on all those around us. On.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

84. “As Buddha said, “What you are is what you have been, what you will be is what you do now.” Padmasambhava went further: “If you want to know your past life, look into your present condition; if you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

85. “The simplicity of total trust is one of the most powerful forces in the world.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

86. “Do not mistake understanding for realization, and do not mistake realization for liberation.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

87. “How often attachment is mistaken for love! Even when the relationship is a good one, love is spoiled by attachment, with its insecurity, possessiveness, and pride; and then when love is gone, all you have left to show for it are the “souvenirs” of love, the scars of attachment.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

88. “Our society promotes cleverness instead of wisdom, and celebrates the most superficial, harsh, and least useful aspects of our intelligence.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

89. “A real miracle, he said, was if someone could liberate just one negative emotion. More.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

90. “Thich Nhat Hanh writes with the voice of the Buddha.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

91. “The purpose of reflecting on death is to make a real change in the depths of your heart, and to come to learn how to avoid the “hole in the sidewalk,” and how to “walk down another street.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

92. “Buddha said: “Do not overlook negative actions merely because they are small; however small a spark may be, it can burn down a haystack as big as a mountain.” Similarly he said: “Do not overlook tiny good actions, thinking they are of no benefit; even tiny drops of water in the end will fill a huge vessel.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

93. “I often think of the words of the great Buddhist master Padmasambhava: “Those who believe they have plenty of time get ready only at the time of death. Then they are ravaged by regret. But isn’t it far too late?” What more chilling commentary on the modern world could there be than most people die unprepared for death, as they have lived, unprepared for life?”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

94. “Whatever you find yourself thinking, let that thought rise and settle, without any constraint. Don’t grasp at it, feed it, or indulge it; don’t cling to it and don’t try to solidify it. Neither follow thoughts nor invite them; be like the ocean looking at its own waves, or the sky gazing down on the clouds that pass through it.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

95. “This world can seem marvelously convincing until death collapses the illusion and evicts us from our hiding place.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

96. “Rely on the message of the teacher, not on his personality; Rely.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

97. “There are so many ways of making the approach to meditation as joyful as possible. You can find the music that most exalts you and use it to open your heart and mind. You can collect pieces of poetry, or quotations of lines of teachings that over the years have moved you, and keep them always at hand to elevate your spirit.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

98. “Peaceful death is really an essential human right, more essential perhaps even than the right to vote or the right to justice; it is a right on which, all religious traditions tell us, a great deal depends for the well-being and spiritual future of the dying person. There.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

99. “The Western poet Rainer Maria Rilke has said that our deepest fears are like dragons guarding our deepest treasure.12.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche

100. “Death is a vast mystery, but there are two things we can layabout it: It is absolutely certain that we will die, and it is uncertain when or how we will die. The only surety we have, then, is this uncertainty about the hour of our death, which we seize on as the excuse to postpone facing death directly. We are like children who cover their eyes in a game of hide-and-seek and think that no one can see them.”

— Sogyal Rinpoche