Meditation is not sitting and fidgeting, daydreaming, worrying, or fantasizing. It means watching, calmly observing the mind itself. Calm observation makes the mind itself calmer. The calmness of the mind creates power to go deeper and deeper into the beds of samskaras, into all the latent memories and impressions that daily provoke our habits and personalities. However, by calmly and very quietly going to the samskaras and observing them they are burnt away; they bubble to the surface and dissipate. This is the process of purification. It is a very powerful practice, and an essential one. Meditation is the exact method of becoming aware of who you are. It is the fundamental training for knowing your inner world.

When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways - either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength.

Once you say 'I want to find Truth', all your life will be deeply affected by it. All your mental and physical habits, feelings and emotions, desires and fears, plans and decisions will undergo a most radical transformation.

It is not by change of place that we can come nearer to Him who is in every place, but by the cultivation of pure desires and virtuous habits.

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.

When we don't nourish ourselves with fresh, healthy food, restful sleep, regular exercise, a daily spiritual practice such as meditation or journaling, and other mind-body healing habits, we will inevitably feel tired, out of balance, irritable, and sometimes even depressed.

The practice of Zen mind is beginner's mind. The innocence of the first inquiry—what am I?—is needed throughout Zen practice. The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities. It is the kind of mind which can see things as they are, which step by step and in a flash can realize the original nature of everything.

When we consciously and deliberately develop new and better habits, our self image tends to outgrow the old habits and grow into the new pattern.

The way of cowardice is to embed ourselves in a cocoon, in which we perpetuate our habitual patterns. When we are constantly recreating our basic patterns of habits and thought, we never have to leap into fresh air or onto fresh ground.

But the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, "The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day."

Whatever bad habits you have in your life are the result of bad company, and you have to overcome them with a good environment.

The normal experience of the body and its aging is a conditioned response (a habit of thinking and behavior). By changing your habits of thinking and behavior, you can change the experience of your body and its aging.

The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the experts, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all possibilities.

Don't let your sins turn into bad habits.

Evil habits, in which men indulge, are the chief cause of disease in the physical as well as the mental state.

Enjoy your life and be happy. Being happy is of the utmost importance. Success in anything is through happiness. More support of nature comes from being happy. Under all circumstances be happy, even if you have to force it a bit to change some long standing habits. Just think of any negativity that comes to you as a raindrop falling into the ocean of your bliss. You may not always have an ocean of bliss, but think that way anyway and it will help it come. Doubting is not blissful and does not create happiness. Be happy, healthy, and let all that love flow through your heart.

As you begin this day, tell yourself, Today I am incarnated anew! I am released from the hypnosis of my old habits and mistakes! Everything that I have long dreamed of doing I will accomplish in this, my new life.

One of the reasons it has seemed so difficult for a person to change his habits, his personality, or his way of life, has been that heretofore nearly all efforts at change have been directed to the circumference of the self, so to speak, rather than to the center.

It is not your passing thoughts or brilliant ideas so much as your plain everyday habits that control your life...

Our self-image and our habits tend to go together. Change one and you will automatically change the other.

When you believe yourself to be a person, you see persons everywhere. In reality there are no persons, only threads of memories and habits. At the moment of realisation the person ceases.

It is possible that a man could live twice as long if he didn't spend the first half of his life acquiring habits that shortens the other half

Every grown-up man consists wholly of habits, although he is often unaware of it and even denies having any habits at all.