"The success of Homo sapiens as a species is built on our inability to tell the difference between a fiction and a reality."

~ Yuval Noah Harari

"I do know enough as a psychologist about learning and memory. And I know that we learn. How much of this I need to do in order to change, I cannot say. But I can say that there is a point at which this brain is not just elastic in moving to what is being suggested, but that it may be plastic in that it can be reset into a new mold."

~ Mahzarin Banaji

"Half of what’s about to occur is unknown, both inside you and outside you."

~ David Whyte

"It felt like my senses were being used in a way that I ignore them a lot."

"This is something you do find in Quaker meetings, actually, and in Buddhist meetings as well. The whole herd, and that may be 50 animals, will suddenly be still, completely still. And it's not just a stillness of voice, it's a stillness of body."

~ Katy Payne

"I read the Internet so much I feel like I’m on page a million of the worst book ever. And I just won’t stop reading it. For some reason it’s so addictive."

~ Aziz Ansari

On a mindfulness retreat, Anderson Cooper puts down the microphone and learns to love silence, as well as life without a cell phone.

When it comes to developing any new skill, it is more important to be clever than to be disciplined.

"I think attentional skills are fundamentally under siege today. Never before in human history have there been so many seductive distractors in a person’s day, in a given hour, or in ten minutes. There are pingings and pop-ups and all kinds of sensory impingements on our attention that want to pull us away from what we’re trying to focus on."

~ Daniel Goleman

Whether we are giving or receiving care, we come face-to-face with time’s elasticity – how it seems to speed up and slow down.

Why is the sound of a mindfulness bell such a great warm up for any attentional fitness workout?

"Seeing for yourself, from your own experience, what works and what doesn’t is what meditation is all about."

~ Jason Siff

"Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to do intensive formal meditation practice. Why should they? Isn’t there enough physical and emotional discomfort in ordinary life? Why intentionally seek it out?

But the monastery will come to each of us when we have to confront our fears, losses, compulsions and anxieties, or process the aftermath of trauma. The monastery comes to us in the form of emotional crisis, illness or injury, a phobia or a failed relationship. The question is whether we will be in a position to recognize and use it as such."

~ Shinzen Young