The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali Quotes

“Undisturbed calmness of mind is attained by cultivating friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and indifference toward the wicked.”
― Patanjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“For those who have an intense urge for Spirit and wisdom, it sits
near them, waiting.”
― Patanjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“Yoga is the cessation of the movements of the mind. Then there is abiding in the Seer's own form.”
― Patanjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“Everything is sorrow for the wise.”
― Patanjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“It is only when the correct practice is followed for a long time, without interruptions and with a quality of positive attitude and eagerness, that it can succeed.”
― Patañjali, Yoga-Sutras (Collections Spiritualites)

“Here is, in truth, the whole secret of Yoga, the science of the soul. The active turnings, the strident vibrations, of selfishness, lust and hate are to be stilled by meditation, by letting heart and mind dwell in spiritual life, by lifting up the heart to the strong, silent life above, which rests in the stillness of eternal love, and needs no harsh vibration to convince it of true being.”
― Patanjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: the Book of the Spiritual Man

“Distractions arise from habitual thought patterns when practice is intermittent.”
― Patañjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“Life cannot be known by the “mind,” its secrets cannot be learned through the “mind.” The proof is, the ceaseless strife and contradiction of opinion among those who trust in the mind. Much less can the “mind” know itself, the more so, because it is pervaded by the illusion that it truly knows, truly is.”
― Patañjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“The great secret is this: it is not enough to have intuitions; we must act on them; we must live them.”
― Patañjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“The purpose of life, therefore, is the realizing of that prophecy; the unveiling of the immortal man; the birth of the spiritual from the psychical, whereby we enter our divine inheritance and come to inhabit Eternity. This is, indeed, salvation, the purpose of all true religion, in all times. Patanjali”
― Patañjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“Every morning put your mind into your heart and stand in the presence of God all the day long.”
― Patañjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“Nothing in all creation is so like God as silence.”
― Patañjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“Never say any man is hopeless, because he only represents a character, a bundle of habits, which can be checked by new and better ones. Character is repeated habits, and repeated habits alone can reform character.   तत्र”
― Swami Vivekanand, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras: Art of Living

“OM: the symbol of the Three in One, the three worlds in the Soul; the three times, past, present, future, in Eternity; the three Divine Powers, Creation, Preservation, Transformation, in the one Being; the three essences, immortality, omniscience, joy, in the one Spirit. This is the Word, the Symbol, of the Master and Lord, the perfected Spiritual Man.”
― Patañjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“35. The personal self seeks to feast on life, through a failure to perceive the distinction between the personal self and the spiritual man. All personal experience really exists for the sake of another: namely, the spiritual man. By perfectly concentrated Meditation on experience for the sake of the Self, comes a knowledge of the spiritual man. The divine ray of the Higher Self, which is eternal, impersonal and abstract, descends into life, and forms a personality, which, through the stress and storm of life, is hammered into a definite and concrete self-conscious individuality. The problem is, to blend these two powers, taking the eternal and spiritual being of the first, and blending with it, transferring into it, the self-conscious individuality of the second; and thus bringing to life a third being, the spiritual man, who is heir to the immortality of his father, the Higher Self, and yet has the self-conscious, concrete individuality of his other parent, the personal self. This is the true immaculate conception, the new birth from above, "conceived of the Holy Spirit." Of this new birth it is said: "that which is born of the Spirit is spirit: ye must be born again." Rightly understood, therefore, the whole life of the personal man is for another, not for himself. He exists only to render his very life and all his experience for the building up of the spiritual man. Only through failure to see this, does he seek enjoyment for himself, seek to secure the feasts of life for himself; not understanding that he must live for the other, live sacrificially, offering both feasts and his very being on the altar; giving himself as a contribution for the building of the spiritual man. When he does understand this, and lives for the Higher Self, setting his heart and thought on the Higher Self, then his sacrifice bears divine fruit, the spiritual man is built up, consciousness awakes in him, and he comes fully into being as a divine and immortal individuality.”
― Patañjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: the Book of the Spiritual Man

“It is the power to focus the consciousness on a given spot, and hold it there Attention is the first and indispensable step in all knowledge.”
― Patañjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“Just as in the case of electricity, the modern theory is that the power leaves the dynamo and completes the circle back to the dynamo, so with hate and love; they must come back to the source. Therefore do not hate anybody, because that hatred which comes out from you, must, in the long run, come back to you. If you love, that love will come back to you, completing the circle.”
― Swami Vivekananda, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“The Yogis say that the man who has discriminating powers, the man of good sense, sees through all that are called pleasure and pain, and knows that they come to all, and that one follows and melts into the other; he sees that men follow an ignis fatuus all their lives, and never succeed in fulfilling their desires. The great King Yudhishthira once said that the most wonderful thing in life is that evry moment we see people dying around us, and yet we think we shall never die. Surrounded by fools on every side, we think we are the only exceptions, the only learned men. Surrounded by all sorts of experiences of fickleness, we think our love is the only lasting love. How can that be? Even love is selfish, and the Yogi says that in the end we shall find that even the love of husbands and wives, children and friends, slowly decays. Decadence seizes everything in this life. It is only when everything, even love, fails, that, with a flash, man finds out how vain, how dreamlike is this world. Then he catches a glimpse of Vairagya, catches a glimpse of the beyond. It is only by giving up this world that the other comes; never through holding on to this one.”
― Swami Vivekananda, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“19. The Mind is not self-luminous, since it can be seen as an object. This is a further step toward overthrowing the tyranny of the "mind": the psychic nature of emotion and mental measuring. This psychic self, the personality, claims to be absolute, asserting that life is for it and through it; it seeks to impose on the whole being of man its narrow, materialistic, faithless view of life and the universe; it would clip the wings of the soaring Soul. But the Soul dethrones the tyrant, by perceiving and steadily affirming that the psychic self is no true self at all, not self-luminous, but only an object of observation, watched by the serene eyes of the Spiritual Man.”
― Patañjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: the Book of the Spiritual Man

“Egotism is but the perversion of spiritual being. Ambition is the inversion of spiritual power. Passion is the distortion of love. The mortal is the limitation of the immortal. When these false images give place to true, then the spiritual man stands forth luminous, as the sun, when the clouds disperse. 4.”
― Patañjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: the Book of the Spiritual Man

“Everything that we are, is the result of habit. That gives us consolation, because if it is only habit, we can make and unmake it at any time. The samshara is left by these vibrations passing out of our mind, each one of them leaving its result. Our character is the sum-total of these marks, and as per as some particular wave prevails one takes that tone. If good prevail one becomes good, if wickedness takes over, one becomes wicked, if joyfulness, one becomes happy. The only remedy for bad habits is counter habits.”
― Patañjali, Patanjali Yoga Sutras

“On other and practical grounds we see that the theory of eternal progression is untenable, for destruction is the goal of everything earthly. All our struggles and hopes and fears and joys, what will they lead to? We shall all end in death. Nothing is so certain as this. Where, then, is this motion in a straight line - this infinite progression? It is only going out to a distance, and coming back to the centre from which it started. See how, from nebulae, the sun, moon, and stars are produced; then they dissolve and go back to nebulae. The same is being done everywhere. The plant takes material from the earth, dissolves, and gives it back. Every form in this world is taken out of surrounding atoms and goes back to these atoms.”
― Swami Vivekananda, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“This is true of the physical powers, and of those which dwell in the higher vestures. There must be, first, purity; as the blood must be pure, before one can attain to physical health. But absence of impurity is not in itself enough, else would many nerveless ascetics of the cloisters rank as high saints. There is needed, further, a positive fire of the will; a keen vital vigour for the physical powers, and something finer, purer, stronger, but of kindred essence, for the higher powers. The fire of genius is something more than a phrase, for there can be no genius without the celestial fire of the awakened spiritual will.”
― Patañjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

“Reason leaves us at a point quite indecisive; we may reason all our lives, as the world has been doing for thousands of years, and the result is that we find we are incompetent to prove or disprove the facts of religion. What we perceive directly we take as the basis, and upon that basis we reason. So it is obvious that reasoning has to run within these bounds of perception. It can never go beyond: the whole scope of realisation, therefore, is beyond sense perception. The yogis say that man can go beyond his direct sense perception, and beyond his reason also. Man has in him the faculty, the power, of transcending his intellect even, and that power is in every being, every creature. By the practice of Yoga that power is aroused, and then man transcends the ordinary limits of reason, and directly perceives things which are beyond all reason.”
― Patañjali, Patanjali Yoga Sutras

“We must have these four sorts of ideas. We must have friendship for all; we must be merciful towards those that are in misery; when people are happy we ought to be happy, and to the wicked we must be indifferent.”
― Patañjali, Patanjali Yoga Sutras

“La raison d'être du monde est d'être source d'expériences multiples et d'ainsi nous mener ultimement à la libération.”
― Patañjali, Yoga Sutras

“As we let go of reacting in conditioned ways, we are jettisoning the learned patterns we have developed in the past to relate to every aspect of experience. To let go of these is to enter into a spontaneous and unpredictable present, unmodulated by wanting, aversion, or other forms of self-centeredness. Indeed, what gets “stirred up” in reaction always has to do with me. The sense of “I” is largely composed of reaction, being an encyclopedic anthology of likes and dislikes, and it infiltrates even our most altruistic thoughts and deeds.”
― Chip Hartranft, The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali: A New Translation with Commentary

“Yoga differs from most comparable Western schools of dualism by regarding not just the physical body but also the mind, ego, and all cognitive functions as belonging to the realm of inert matter.”
― Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary

“La amistad, la compasión y la alegría clarifican y tranquilizan la mente. Deben practicarse tanto en la felicidad como en la desgracia, tanto con quienes nos ayudan como con aquellos que nos perjudican.”
― Patañjali, LOS YOGASUTRAS DE PATANJALI

“The Self and the contents of the mind are completely separate.”
― Patañjali, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali