Equanimity Quotes

As parents, we may as well accept that we will "lose it" at times. Perfect equanimity is beyond us. Temporary breaks in the relationship with the child are inevitable and are not in themselves harmful, unless they are frequent and catastrophic. The real harm is inflicted when the parent makes the child work at reestablishing contact, as in forcing a child to apologize before granting "forgiveness." There ~ Gabor Mate

Don't imagine you are in a worse place than you actually are. Things could have been far worse. So, seize the day, count your blessings and move on. You can survive a crisis only by dealing it with one day at a time. Don't add up all your problems in your mind and think you are finished. Compartmentalize your problems; put them in different buckets and project-manage them separately. This is how you live through uncertain times – making decisions when there are few or no options to choose from. You never see it this way when you are going through a crisis. But, unfailingly, every crisis leaves you stronger, wiser – and happy! ~ AVIS Viswanathan

Not one woman over seventeen has any faith in her skin tone, and no woman over thirty can ever regard her upper arms with equanimity. ~ Cynthia Heimel

Lijuan warned Raphael I'd make him a little bit mortal.'
'You have.' Quiet equanimity. 'And you worry you've weakened him. You have.'
Elena flinched. 'Elena.'
Shaking his head, Keir waited until she met his gaze again. 'Even an archangel needs a weakness - absolute power is a corruption. ~ Nalini Singh

When we spend money on others, for example, we feel more content than when we spend money on ourselves. This is a kind of well-being rooted in meaning, connection, and equanimity - called eudaimonia by the ancient Greeks and in modern times perhaps called "inner" or "true" happiness. ~ Daniel J. Siegel

Unlike these powerful grown-ups, children have no ideologies to reinforce, no superstructure of political opinion to promote, no civic equanimity or image to defend, no personal reputation to secure. ~ Jonathan Kozol

If he lose a hand through disease or war, or if some accident puts out one or both of his eyes, he will be satisfied with what is left, taking as much pleasure in his impaired and maimed body as he took when it was sound. But while he does not pine for these parts if they are missing, he prefers not to lose them. 5. In this sense the wise man is self-sufficient, that he can do without friends, not that he desires to do without them. When I say "can," I mean this: he endures the loss of a friend with equanimity. ~ Seneca.

Equanimity can be hard to talk about. ~ Sharon Salzberg

How did I gain from not remembering my earthly self? It allowed me to go deep into realms beyond the worldly without having to worry about what I was leaving behind. Throughout my entire time in those worlds, I was a soul with nothing to lose. No places to miss, no people to mourn. I had come from nowhere and had no history, so I fully accepted my circumstances - even the initial murk and mess of the Realm of the Earthworm's-Eye View - with equanimity. ~ Eben Alexander

How strange was the relation between parents and children! When they were small the parents doted on them, passed through agonies of apprehension at each childish ailment, and the children clung to their parents with love and adoration; a few years passed, the children grew up, and persons not of their kin were more important to their happiness than father or mother. Indifference displaced the blind and instinctive love of the past. Their meetings were a source of boredom and irritation. Distracted once at the thought of a month's separation they were able now to look forward with equanimity to being parted for years. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

We really cannot see what equanimity there is in jerking a lacerated carp out of the water by the jaws, merely because it has no the power of making a noise; for we presume that the most philosophic of anglers would hardly delight in catching a shrieking fish. ~ Leigh Hunt

When attachment does not occur when someone gives flowers and no abhorrence occurs when someone throws stones; that is considered equanimity. ~ Dada Bhagwan

- 'Poise is perfect balance, an equanimity of body and mind, complete composure whatever the social scene. Elegant dress, immaculate grooming, and perfect deportment all contribute to the attainment of self-confidence.' - ~ Muriel Spark

The near enemy. It's a psychological concept. Two emotions that look the same but are actually opposites. The one parades as the other, is mistaken for the other, but one is healthy and the other's sick, twisted. There are three couplings. Attachment masquerades as Love, Pity as Compassion, and Indifference as Equanimity.

Compassion involves empathy. You see the stricken person as an equal. Pity doesn't. If you pity someone, you feel superior. As long as the pity's in place there's not room for compassion. It squeezes out the nobler emotion. ~ Louise Penny

No doubt you are right ... there would be far less suffering amongst mankind if men ... did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

He has no need for faith who knows the uncreated, who has cut off rebirth, who has destroyed any opportunity for good or evil, and cast away all desire. He is indeed the ultimate man. ~ Gautama Buddha

Maintaining equanimity in misery is called penance (tapa). ~ Dada Bhagwan

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions. ~ Albert Einstein

Survival is as much a matter of grace as fight. The expression, 'grace under pressure' implies the attainment of equanimity and equilibrium. The fundamental durability of the human body surprises us because the pain can be so intense - yet pain is often transient and hides the tremendous effforts the body is engaged in to heal itself. ~ Gretel Ehrlich

When force of circumstance upsets your equanimity, lose no time in recovering your self-control, and do not remain out of tune longer than you can help. Habitual recurrence to the harmony will increase your mastery of it. ~ Marcus Aurelius

The teachings on love given by the Buddha are clear, scientific, and applicable ... Love, compassion, joy, and equanimity are the very nature of an enlightened person. They are the four aspects of true love within ourselves and within everyone and everything. ~ Nhat Hanh

The camel has a big dumb ugly hump. But in the desert, where prettier, more streamlined beasts die quickly of thirst, the camel survives quite nicely. As legend has it, the camel carries its own water, stores it in its stupid hump. If individuals, like camels, perfect their inner resources, if we have the power within us, then we can cross any wasteland in relative comfort and survive in arid surroundings without relying on the external. Often, moreover, it is our "hump" - that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable - that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes. ~ Tom Robbins

The Greeks had a word for this: apatheia. It's the kind of calm equanimity that comes with the absence of irrational or extreme emotions. Not the loss of feeling altogether, just the loss of the harmful, unhelpful kind. Don't let the negativity in, don't let those emotions even get started. Just say: No, thank you. I can't afford to panic. ~ Ryan Holiday

It is the duty of the long-term investor to endure great losses with equanimity. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Luckily, I had figured out that life was not a banquet at all but a potluck. A party celebrating nothing but the desire to be together, where everyone brings what they have, what they are able to at any given time, and it is accepted with equal love and equanimity. You can arrive with hot dogs because you are just too tired or too poor to bring anything else, or you can bring the fancier, most elaborate dish in the world, and plenty of it, to share with people who brought the three-bean salad they clearly got at the grocery store. People do the best they can, at any given time. That's the thing to remember. ~ Emily Nunn

The last gift a parent can give to children is to teach them, through example, how to face death with equanimity. ~ Irvin D. Yalom

Perhaps we still have a basically superstitious tendency to associate failure with dishonesty and guilt - failure being interpreted as "punishment." Even if a man starts out with good intentions, if he fails we tend to think he was somehow "at fault." If he was not guilty, he was at least "wrong." And "being wrong" is something we have not yet learned to face with equanimity and understanding. We either condemn it with god-like disdain or forgive it with god-like condescension. We do not manage to accept it with human compassion, humility and identification. Thus we never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggressivity and hypocrisy. ~ Thomas Merton

The greatest happiness for the thinking person is to have explored the explorable and to venerate in equanimity that which cannot be explored. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Life, death, preservation, loss, failure, success, poverty, riches, worthiness, unworthiness, slander, fame, hunger, thirst, cold, heat - these are the alternations of the world, the workings of fate. Day and night they change place before us, and wisdom cannot spy out their source. Therefore, they should not be enough to destroy your harmony; they should not be allowed to enter the storehouse of the spirit. If you can harmonize and delight in them, master them and never be at a loss for joy; if you can do this day and night without break and make it be spring with everything, mingling with all and creating the moment within your own mind - this is what I call being whole in power. ~ Zhuangzi

As Oliver accompanied his master in most of his adult expeditions too, in order that he might acquire that equanimity of demeanour and full command of nerve which was essential to a finished undertaker, he had many opportunities of observing the beautiful resignation and fortitude with which some strong-minded people bear their trials and losses. ~ Charles Dickens

Sometimes people in abusive situations think they're responsible for the other person's happiness or that they're going to fix them and make them feel better. The practice of equanimity teaches that it's not all up to you to make someone else happy. ~ Sharon Salzberg

Life happens at its own pace and in its own time. It has a mind of its own. Your rushing through it only increases your stress levels and makes you anxious. You can do nothing to Life. At all times, in all contexts, you are never in control – Life is! And all you can and must do is to learn to live fully with what is. This does not mean inaction – trusting the process of Life is a lot of action; of keeping the faith and being patient. So, sit quietly doing whatever you can in a given context. And whatever must happen alone will happen; whatever is due to you alone will flow to you…on its own. When you are calm, you are non-worrying, non-frustrated and non-suffering and only when you are in this state will you see how perfect your Life really is! ~ AVIS Viswanathan

The two Virtues of Equanimity and Compassion become more available to the person whose ego-shell has been smashed-either by great suffering or by great love-or by both. ~ Richard Rohr

I feel no shame at being found still owning a share when the bottom of the market comes ... I would go much further than that. I should say that it is from time to time the duty of a serious investor to accept the depreciation of his holdings with equanimity and without reproaching himself. ... An investor ... should be aiming primarily at long-period results, and should be solely judged by these. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Some of us ran so far away, during a period of survival, that we forgot to come back home to ourselves. Return home to yourself. You are safe now. ~ Lalah Delia

Impeaching a President implies that we make mistakes, grave ones, in electing or appointing officials, and that these elected men and women might be not great but small - unable to listen to, never mind to represent, the people they serve with justice, conscience, and equanimity. Impeachment suggests dysfunction, uncertainty, and discord - not the discord of war, which can be memorialized as valorous, purposeful, and idealistic, but the far less dramatic and often squalid, sad, intemperate conflicts of peace, partisanship, race, and rancor. Impeachment implies a failure - a failure of government of the people to function, and of leaders to lead. And presidential impeachment means failure at the very top. ~ Brenda Wineapple

Faith enables many of us to endure life's difficulties with an equanimity that would be scarcely conceivable in a world lit only by reason. ~ Sam Harris

The disorders that psychology associates with the dissonance between what parents say to children and what children know to be reality - from deep insecurities to chronic anxiety to depression - are not to be found among the hunter-gatherers I have known. This is not to claim that they are people who know nothing of mental illness. Rather, it is to look at the absence of a particular kind of illness, one that in my own society is somewhere between common and the norm. The apparent sturdiness of the hunter-gatherer personality, the virtual universality of self-confidence and equanimity, the absence of anxiety disorders and most depressive illnesses - these may well be the benefits of using words to tell the truth. ~ Hugh Brody

The meditative mind sees disagreeable or agreeable things with equanimity, patience, and good-will. Transcendent knowledge is seeing reality in utter simplicity. (146) ~ Jean-Yves Leloup

In this thing one man is superior to another, that he is better able to bear adversity and prosperity. ~ Philemon

It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity, But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable. ~ Oscar Wilde

Equanimity means to let go, not to abandon. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

It is considered equanimity when attachment does not arise towards someone who offers flowers and abhorrence does not arise towards someone who is pelting stones. ~ Dada Bhagwan

Courageous leaders face unpleasant and even devastating situations with equanimity, then act firmly to bring good from trouble, even if their action is unpopular. Leadership always faces natural human inertia and opposition. But courage follows through with a task until it is done. ~ J. Oswald Sanders

Equanimity is often mistaken for depression. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The 7 factors of enlightenment: mindfullness, investigation of mental objects, energy, joy, tranquility, concentration and equanimity. ~ Nhat Hanh

Equanimity is the hallmark of spirituality. It is neither chasing nor avoiding but just being in the middle. ~ Amit Ray

The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down. ~ William James

God said to accept whatever circumstances that come along. Circumstance is a natural thing. In it, 'Do this and don't do that'- should not be there. Circumstances are a 'scientific circumstantial evidence' ['Vyavasthit']. You should 'settle them with equanimity'. ~ Dada Bhagwan

Under stress, they seek composure above all. But they do not find equanimity. ~ Sherry Turkle

So nothing is ever good or bad unless you think it so, and vice versa. All luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity. ~ Boethius

With regards to the way of death, if you are prepared to die at any time, you will be able to meet your release from life with equanimity. As calamities are usually not as bad as anticipated beforehand, it is foolhardy to feel anxiety about tribulations not yet endured. Just accept that the worst possible fate for a man in service is to become a rōnin, or death by seppuku. Then nothing will faze you. ~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo

Self-control, in every station and to every individual, is indispensable, if people would retain that equanimity of mind, which, depending on self-respect, is the essential of contentment and happiness. ~ Sarah Josepha Hale

I always wonder when people have any kind of spiritual and meditative practice especially if it's one designed in part to help them cope with things that seem unmanageable and to cope with something like death, if they're able to maintain that practice and maintain the equanimity at the time of death whether it's, you know, that person's or that person's loved one. ~ Laurie Anderson

Because love, compassion, and joy can lead to excessive attachment, their warmth needs to be balanced with equanimity. Because equanimity can lead to excessive detachment, its coolness needs to be balanced with love, compassion, and joy. Established together, these radiant qualities express mental harmony. ~ Jack Kornfield

Don't follow after the object of hatred, look at the angry mind. Anger liberated by itself as it arises is mirrorlike wisdom.

Don't chase after the object of pride, look at the grasping mind. Self-importance liberated as it arises is the wisdom of equanimity.

Don't hanker after the object of desire, look at the craving mind. ~ Dilgo Khyentse

Calmness has the power to leave dirty water as clean water on top of dirt. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I sometimes marvel at how far I've come - blissful, even, in the knowledge that I am slowly becoming a well-evolved human being - only to have the illusion shattered by an episode of bad behaviour that contradicts the new and reinforces the old. At these junctures of self-reflection, I ask the question: "are all my years of hard work unraveling before my eyes, or am I just having an episode?" For the sake of personal growth and the pursuit of equanimity, I choose the latter and accept that, on this journey of evolution, I may not encounter just one bad day, but a group of many. ~ B.G. Bowers

If I seem to you to change my state and alter my condition, I do not change my mind. I try always to be Hutten, never to desert myself, but to walk with equanimity through the unequal scenes of life. ~ Ulrich Von Hutten

I have heard that he who knows what is enough will not let himself be entangled by thoughts of gain; that he who really understands how to find satisfaction will not be afraid of other kinds of loss; and that he who practices the cultivation of what is within him will not be ashamed because he holds no position in society. ~ Zhuangzi

Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. ~ Herman Melville

Did not Socrates, all the while he unflinchingly refused to concede one iota of loyalty to his daemon, obey with equal fidelity and equanimity the command of his earthly master, the State? His conscience he followed, alive; his country he served, dying. Alack the day when a state grows so powerful as to demand of its citizens the dictates of their consciences! ~ Inazo Nitobe

What is patience but an equanimity which enables you to rise superior to the trials of life. ~ William Osler

Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him. ~ Thomas Hardy

The naturalistic hypothesis that it's the brain that constructs the sense of self, now being explored by neuroscientists and neuro-philosophers worldwide, is entirely consistent with what meditation might reveal. Since experience seems a function (somehow – explaining consciousness is just getting underway) of what the brain and body do, the very sense of being a subject which purportedly "has" experience and "to whom" things happen is itself simply another neurally-instantiated aspect of subjectivity, albeit psychologically fundamental. What the brain constructs can perhaps be temporarily deconstructed, given the right conditions and sufficient practice. Thus the first-person meditative experience of the dropping away of ego, should it occur, is to experience what third-person science shows to be the dependent arising, and non-arising, of the phenomenal self. In this way, the scientific-physicalist and meditative-experiential perspectives, both empirical in different senses, end up with the same conclusion: the very core of self – the experienced locus of all our concern and striving – is a mutable, perishable, dependent phenomenon, just as the Buddha taught. Seeing this clearly from both perspectives might give us some psychological distance from the very self on behalf of which we're striving, giving us a measure of equanimity and opening space for compassion centered on others. Science and Buddhist practice are thus consilient partners in the quest for liberation. ~ Thomas W. Clark

Equanimity embraces the loved and the unloved, the agreeable and the disagreeable, the pleasure and pain. It eliminates clinging and aversion. ~ Jack Kornfield

Happiness and sadness are just two eternal truths like day and night. A man of superior intellect is never affected by these emotions. They are not base emotions at all but a reflection of our thoughts, a reaction to our perspective on things we see, hear and do. Equanimity is not only desirable in a warrior, but a must. Without it, you are as good as dead in the battlefield. ~ Anand Neelakantan

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity. ~ Carl Jung

Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime. ~ Samuel Butler

Well,' I answered, 'when a Westerner discusses, say, Hindu-ism or Buddhism, he is always conscious of the fundamental differences between these ideologies and his own. He may admire this or that of their ideas, but would naturally never consider the possibility of substituting them for his own. Because he a priori admits this impossibility, he is able to contemplate such really alien cultures with equanimity and often "with sympathetic appreciation. But when it comes to Islam - which is by no means as alien to Western values as Hindu or Buddhist philosophy this Western equanimity is almost invariably disturbed by an emotional bias. Is it perhaps, I sometimes wonder, because the values of Islam are close enough to those of the West to constitute a potential challenge to many Western concepts of spiritual and social life? ~ Muhammad Asad

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present. ~ Marcus Aurelius

How do you last a torrid time in Life?
1.Accept the reality that you are in the throes of a crisis. Stop wishing that it didn't exist. Acceptance always delivers inner peace.
2.Know that the storm will always be strong. By even thinking of its ferocity, you are only going to feel debilitated. At the epicenter of a storm, it is always calm. Find that center, your center. That's where you will find strength.
3.Your center is where you lose sense of time, place and thought. Art – anything inherent that makes you come alive – often leads you there.
4.Trust the process of Life. Do what you can do without losing your inner peace – daily, diligently.
5.No matter how intense it is, no storm lasts forever. All storms pass. So, be patient, surrender completely, let go…and offer yourself to be led by Life… ~ AVIS Viswanathan

How slight a thing will disturb the equanimity of our frail minds! ~ Charles Dickens

Life has many petals. Spirituality is unfolding those petals with with love, responsibility, equanimity, creativity and compassion. ~ Amit Ray

He didn't lead anyone on, or make any promises. Instead he conveyed a sense of calm and equanimity, like a man who had banished from his life all superfluous sentiment, all longings and all patience for the nonessential. He was like Yoda, Buddha and the Gladiator all rolled into one. ~ Michael Robotham

Vipassana taught me how to maintain equanimity in all situations of life. ~ Subhash Chandra

If I know the classical psychological theories well enough to pass my comps and can reformulate them in ways that can impress peer reviewers from the most prestigious journals, but have not the practical wisdom of love, I am only an intrusive muzak soothing the ego while missing the heart.

And if I can read tea leaves, throw the bones and manipulate spirits so as to understand the mysteries of the universe and forecast the future with scientific precision, and if I have achieved a renaissance education in both the exoteric and esoteric sciences that would rival Faust and know the equation to convert the mass of mountains into psychic energy and back again, but have not love, I do not even exist.

If I gain freedom from all my attachments and maintain constant alpha waves in my consciousness, showing perfect equanimity in all situations, ignoring every personal need and compulsively martyring myself for the glory of God, but this is not done freely from love, I have accomplished nothing.

Love is great-hearted and unselfish; love is not emotionally reactive, it does not seek to draw attention to itself. Love does not accuse or compare. It does not seek to serve itself at the expense of others. Love does not take pleasure in other peeople's sufferings, but rejoices when the truth is revealed and meaningful life restored. Love always bears reality as it is, extending mercy to all people in every situation. Love is faithful in all things, is con ~ Stephen Muse

Sophisticated meditative disciplines, healing practices, cognitive and emotional trainings, conflict resolution techniques - he used them all to awaken his visitors to their own qualities of integrity, equanimity, gratitude, and forgiveness. ~ Jack Kornfield

There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to you when you take nothing personally. ~ Miguel Ruiz

To preserve openness of heart and calmness of mind, nurture these attitudes:

Kindness to those who are happy
Compassion for those who are less fortunate
Honor for those who embody noble qualities
Equanimity to those whose actions oppose your values ~ Nischala Joy Devi

But the sun was shining, and some of the people in the world had been left alive, and it was doubtful whether the ridiculousness of man would ever completely succeed in destroying the world - or, in fact, the basic equanimity of the least and commonest flower: for would its kind not come up again in the spring? come up, if necessary, among, between, or out of - beastly inconvenient - the smashed corpses lying in strict composure, in that hush infallible and sincere?
And was not this something to be thankful for?
And in the meantime, while people did live they would be grand, would be glorious and brave, would have nimble hearts that would beat and beat. They would even get up nonsense, through wars, through divorce, through evictions and jiltings and taxes.
And, in the meantime, she was going to have another baby.
The weather was bidding her bon voyage. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

While it is a truism to observe that if humans were angels, law would be unnecessary, we could equally turn the truism around, and note that if humans were devils, law would be pointless. In this sense, the law-making project always presupposes the improvability, if not the perfectibility, of humankind. Whether our view of human nature tends toward Hobbesian grimness or Rousseauian equanimity, we tend to think of law as critical to reducing brutality and violence. ~ Rosa Brooks

A contemplative should pay equal attention to concentration, energetic effort and equanimity, and not exclusively to one of these factors only. ~ Gautama Buddha

Every day I strive to get to a place where I'm not effected by the external world, and I don't use the external world to define or tell me who I am. I strive for a state of equanimity and calm and a state of grace, so I can be free of definitions. If you are free, then you can create beautiful things. It's really just shutting out the noise. ~ Laurel Holloman

Often I felt that these men were play-acting: the unreality of their role was their security, even their own destinies were to them saga and folk-tale rather than a private matter; these were men under a spell, men who had been turned into birds or even more likely into some strange beast, and who bore their magic shapes with the same unflurried equanimity, magnanimity, and dignity that we children had marvelled at the beasts of fairy tale. Did they not suspect, moreover, with the wordless apprehension of animals, that if their magic shapes were to be stripped from them the fairy tale would be at an end and their security gone, too, while real life would begin with all it's problems, perhaps in some town where there was neither nature or mirage, no link with the folk-tale and the past, no ancient path to the far side of the mountains and down to the river gullies and out beyond the grass plains, no landmarks from the Sagas? - Only a restless search for sterile, deadening enjoyment. ~ Halldor Laxness

A compassionate heart still feels anger, greed, jealousy, and other such emotions. But it accepts them for what they are with equanimity, and cultivates the strength of mind to let them arise and pass without identifying with or acting upon them. ~ Stephen Batchelor

But taking my meal outside by the burning juniper in the fireplace with more desert and mountain than I could explore in a lifetime open to view, I was invited to contemplate a far larger world, one which extends into a past and into a future without any limits known to human kind. By taking off my shoes and digging my toes into the sand I made contact with that larger world - an exhilarating feeling which leads to equanimity. Certainly I was still by myself, so to speak - there were no other people around and there still are none - but in the midst of such a grand tableau it was impossible to give full and serious consideration to Albuquerque. All that is human melted with the sky and faded out beyond the mountains and I felt, as I feel - is it a paradox? - that a man can never find or need better companionship than that of himself. ~ Edward Abbey

Whence thine eyes see equanimity in
all things...this is peace. ~ Christine Horner

To sit a long sesshin is a major blow to our hopes and dreams, the barriers to enlightenment. And to say that there is no hope is not at all pessimistic. There can be no hope because there is nothing but this very moment. When we hope, we are anxious because we get lost between where we are and where we hope to be. No hope (nonattachment, the enlightened state) is a life of settledness, of equanimity, of genuine thought and emotion. It is the fruit of true practice, always beneficial to oneself and to others, and worth the endless devotion and practice it entails. ~ Charlotte Joko Beck

Aside from actually manifesting your SoulMate, synchronicities, equanimity and gratitude are the three main signs that your inner work is working and you are on the right path to manifesting your SoulMate. ~ Annette Vaillancourt

I must refuse to believe that the Germans contemplate with equanimity the evacuation of cities like London for fear of destruction to be wrought by man's inhuman ingenuity. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Love is Compassion, Endurance, Equanimity, Impartiality, Magnetic, Patient and Just (and Where Justice Is Not, Hate-Traders Profit) ~ Elizabeth Lucye Robillard

Enduring happiness was only possible with equanimity. As long as our happiness depended on circumstances, it would be as fleeting and unreliable as the events themselves. ~ David Michie

What's required is to find some sort of balance. If we're always engaged in the world, responding to others, doing good works, it's very easy to become so invested in a particular outcome that we lose our equanimity. We can become consumed by stress because we can't fix all that is wrong. The world is as it is. So we need that inner perspective that enables us to let things be, that allows us to step back. ~ Thanissara

This penetrating vocabulary of "initiatory acts," "the infectiousness of the unconflicted person," "priority magic," and so on allows us to understand more subtly the dynamics of group sadism, the utter equanimity with which groups kill. It is not just that "father permits it" or "orders it." It is more: the magical heroic transformation of the world and of oneself. This is the illusion that man craves, as Freud said, and that makes the central person so effective a vehicle for group emotion. ~ Ernest Becker

If a man, having lashed two hulls together, is crossing a river, and an empty boat happens along and bumps into him, no matter how hot-tempered the man may be, he will not get angry. But if there should be someone in the other boat, then he will shout out to haul this way or veer that. If his first shout is unheeded, he will shout again, and if that is not heard, he will shout a third time, this time with a torrent of curses following. In the first instance, he wasn't angry; now in the second he is. Earlier he faced emptiness, now he faces occupancy. If a man could succeed in making himself empty, and in that way wander through the world, then who could do him harm? ~ Zhuangzi

There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such a state is not tolerable to most people. Why else would someone succumb to the attractions of romantic love more than once? Didn't they learn their lesson the first time or the tenth time or the twentieth time? And it's the same old lesson: everything in this life - I repeat, everything - is more trouble than it's worth. And simply being alive is the basic trouble. This is something that is more recognized in Eastern societies than in the West. There's a minor tradition in Greek philosophy that instructs us to seek a state of equanimity rather than one of ecstasy, but it never really caught on for obvious reasons. Buddhism advises its practitioners not to seek highs or lows but to follow a middle path to personal salvation from the painful cravings of the average sensual life, which is why it was pretty much reviled by the masses and mutated into forms more suited to human drives and desires. It seems evident that very few people can simply sit still. Children spin in circles until they collapse with dizziness. ~ Thomas Ligotti

It is funny how people - millions and millions of people - go about watching the telly and singing and humming in spite of the fact that they lost brother or father or lover in a war; and what is stranger still, they contemplate with equanimity seeing their other brothers or lovers off to yet another war. They don't see the tragedy of it all. Now and then one of the millions reads a book, or starts thinking, or something shakes him, and then he sees tragedy all over the place. Wherever he looks, he finds tragedy. He finds it tragic that other people don't see this tragedy around them and then he becomes like Font or Edna, or joins some party or other, or marches behind banners until his own life, seen detachedly, becomes a little tragic. ~ Waguih Ghali

One is to cross this ocean in the form of obstinacy. We are standing on this side of obstinacy and we have to go to the other side. If someone becomes instrumental in removing your obstinacy; do not be disturbed about it, consider him to be extremely beneficial and undergo that experience with equanimity. ~ Dada Bhagwan

For many, many years, I was always whipping up things in order to keep myself busy and moving ever forward and saying, 'What's next? What's next? What's next?' I like the equanimity that comes with my age. I don't have big highs, and I don't have big lows. Even if this job goes away tomorrow, the nonstop ambition is a thing of the past for me. I've mellowed ~ Jane Lynch