# Meditation

Meditation is a practice where an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing their mind on a particular object, thought or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.

## Quotes
### F

* Meditation is the soul's perspective glass, whereby, in her long remove, she discerneth God, as if He were nearer at hand.
** Owen Feltham, quoted in The Retrospective Review, vol. 10, pt. 2 (1824), p. 345
* Avoid all refined speculation; confine yourself to simple reflections, and recur to them frequently. Those who pass too rapidly from one truth to another feed their curiosity and restlessness; they even distract their intellect with too great a multiplicity of views. Give every truth time to send down deep root into the heart.
** François Fénelon, The Inner Life, ch. 8, as translated in James W. Metcalf (ed.) Spiritual Progress; or, Instructions in the Divine Life of the Soul, pt. 1 (New York, 1867), p. 53

### G

* Thy thoughts to nobler meditations give, And study how to die, not how to live.
** George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne, "Meditations on Death", st. 1, Poems upon Several Occasions (London, 1712), p. 93

### H

* It is not he that reads most, but he that meditates most on Divine truth, that will prove the choicest, wisest, strongest Christian.
** Bishop Joseph Hall, as quoted in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert (ed.) Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1883), p. 406
* Happy the heart that keeps its twilight hour, And, in the depths of heavenly peace reclined, Loves to commune with thoughts of tender power,— Thoughts that ascend, like angels beautiful, A shining Jacob's-ladder of the mind!
** Paul Hamilton Hayne, "Sonnet [9]", Avolio; ... with Poems (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1860), p. 79

### M

* It is an excellent sign, that after the cares and labors of the day, you can return to your pious exercises and meditations with undiminished attention.
** Hannah More, Letter to Lady Waldegrave (Battersea Rise, 1805), in William Roberts (ed.) Memoirs, vol. 2 (New York, 1834), p. 125
* Night by night I will lie down and sleep in the thought of God, and in the thought, too, that my waking may be in the bosom of the Father; and some time it will be, so I trust.
** William Mountford, Euthanasy, or Happy Talk Towards the End of Life (Boston and New York, 1848), ch. 2, p. 27

### P

* Man holds an inward talk with his self alone, which it behooves him to regulate well.
** Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1699; 1958 translation), § 535
* Fixing the consciousness on one point or region is concentration (dhāraṇā). A steady, continuous flow of attention directed towards the same point or region is meditation (dhyāna). When the object of meditation engulfs the meditator, appearing as the subject, self-awareness is lost. This is samādhi.
** Patanjali, Yoga Sutras, verse 3, as translated by B. K. S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (1993)

### S

* For with all our pretension to enlightenment, are we not now a talking, desultory, rather than a meditative generation?
** John Campbell Shairp, as quoted in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert (ed.) Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1883), p. 406
* He is not lolling on a lewd love-bed, But on his knees at meditation; Not dallying with a brace of courtesans, But meditating with two deep divines.
** William Shakespeare, Richard III (c. 1592/3), act 3, sc. 7

### T

* Smiling means that we are ourselves, that we have sovereignty over ourselves, that we are not drowned in forgetfulness. This kind of smile can be seen on the faces of Buddhas and bodhisattvas.
** Thích Nhất Hạnh, Being Peace (1987)

### Z

* Profound meditation in solitude and silence frequently exalts the mind above its natural tone, fires the imagination, and produces the most refined and sublime conceptions. The soul then tastes the purest and most refined delight, and almost loses the idea of existence in the intellectual pleasure it receives. The mind on every motion darts through space into eternity; and raised, in its free enjoyment of its powers by its own enthusiasm, strengthens itself in the habitude of contemplating the noblest subjects, and of adopting the most heroic pursuits.
** Johann G. Zimmerman, Über die Einsamkeit (1784), translated as Solitude (New York: E. Duyckinck, 1819), p. 32