Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.
Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha, lived in northern India around the fifth century BC. By tradition he gave up a privileged life to pursue the question of suffering. The teachings attributed to him were transmitted orally for several generations before being written down, so his original words cannot be reliably separated from later layers.
About this theme: Mindfulness
Mindfulness has become close to an industry in recent decades, which makes it easy to forget how old the practice is. Buddhist texts on attention are two and a half millennia old, and the Stoics kept journals for the same purpose: to notice what is actually happening in the mind before acting on it. Marcus Aurelius wrote his notes for himself, in the morning, before the day's duties.
More by Buddha
More on Mindfulness
- The earth laughs in flowers.— Ralph Waldo Emerson
- True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.— Seneca
- The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.— Michel de Montaigne
- A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.— Blaise Pascal