200+ Jay Shetty Quotes: Words of Wisdom from the Life Coach and Author

Jay Shetty quotes are a collection of powerful, thought-provoking phrases that capture the wisdom and insight of the motivational speaker and former monk. These quotes inspire us to reflect on life’s deeper questions and strive for personal growth. Here are some of the best:

216 Famous Jay Shetty Quotes to Live by

• Actually, the greatest detachment is being close to everything and not letting it consume and own you. That’s real strength.
• In 1902, the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley wrote: I am not what I think I am, and I am not what you think I am. I am what I think you think I am.
• When we accept the temporary nature of everything in our lives, we can feel gratitude for the good fortune of getting to borrow them for a time.
• Salt is so humble that when something goes wrong, it takes the blame, and when everything goes right, it doesn’t take credit.
• Find me someone who has gone to the darkest parts of their own character where they were so close to their own self-destruction and found a way to get up and out of it, and I will bow on my knees to you. … You’re my teacher.
• Because the only thing that stays with you from the moment you’re born until the moment you die is your breath. All your friends, your family, the country you live in, all of that can change. The one thing that stays with you is your breath.
• Too often we love people who don’t love us, but we fail to return the love of others who do.
• Location has energy; time has memory. If you do something at the same time every day, it becomes easier and natural. If you do something in the same space every day, it becomes easier and natural.
• Albert Einstein said, If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
• It is impossible to build one’s own happiness on the unhappiness of others.
• If you don’t break your ego, life will break it for you.
• There is toxicity everywhere around us. In the environment, in the political atmosphere, but the origin is in people’s hearts. Unless we clean the ecology of our own heart and inspire others to do the same, we will be an instrument of polluting the environment. But if we create purity in our own heart, then we can contribute great purity to the world around us.
• When you deal with fear and hardship, you realize that you’re capable of dealing with fear and hardship. This gives you a new perspective: the confidence that when bad things happen, you will find ways to handle them. With that increased objectivity, you become better able to differentiate what’s actually worth being afraid of and what’s not.
• Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness.
• Here’s the life hack: Service is always the answer. It fixes a bad day. It tempers the burdens we bear. Service helps other people and helps us. We don’t expect anything in return, but what we get is the joy of service. It’s an exchange of love. When you’re living in service, you don’t have time to complain and criticize. When you’re living in service, your fears go away. When you’re living in service, you feel grateful. Your material attachments diminish.
• Monks understand that routine frees your mind, but the biggest threat to that freedom is monotony. People complain about their poor memories, but I’ve heard it said that we don’t have a retention problem, we have an attention problem.
• This ten-year-old monk added, When you get stressed—what changes? Your breath. When you get angry—what changes? Your breath. We experience every emotion with the change of the breath. When you learn to navigate and manage your breath, you can navigate any situation in life.
• I wish is code for I don’t want to do anything differently.
• When we acknowledge that all of our blessings are like a fancy rental car or a beautiful Airbnb, we are free to enjoy them without living in constant fear of losing them. We are all the lucky vacationers enjoying our stay in Hotel Earth.
• A quote from Alī, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammed, best explains the monk idea of detachment: Detachment is not that you own nothing, but that nothing should own you. I love how this summarizes detachment in a way that it’s not usually explained.
• Aspects of Love, Everything you do in the day from washing to eating breakfast, having meetings, driving to work … watching television or deciding instead to read … everything you do is your spiritual life. It is only a matter of how consciously you do these ordinary things
• First, we become aware of a feeling or issue—we spot it. Then we pause to address what the feeling is and where it comes from—we stop to consider it. And last, we amend our behavior—we swap in a new way of processing the moment. SPOT, STOP, SWAP.
• But monks believe that when it comes to happiness and joy, there is always a seat with your name on it. In other words, you don’t need to worry about someone taking your place. In the theater of happiness, there is no limit. Everyone who wants to partake in mudita can watch the show. With unlimited seats, there is no fear of missing out.
• When you are hired for a job, take a moment to reflect on all the lost jobs and/or failed interviews that led to this victory. You can think of them as necessary challenges along the way. When we learn to stop segmenting experiences and periods of our life and instead see them as scenes and acts in a larger narrative, we gain perspective that helps us deal with fear.
• It is also important to share your own thoughts and dreams, hopes and worries. The vulnerability of exposing yourself is a way of giving trust and showing respect for another person’s opinion. It enables the other person to understand the previous experiences and beliefs you bring to whatever you do together.
• Happiness is feeling good about yourself, having close relationships, making the world a better place. 
• Revenge is the mode of ignorance—it’s often said that you can’t fix yourself by breaking someone else.
• Śāntideva, It is not possible to control all external events; but if I simply control my mind, what need is there to control other things?
• Criticizing someone else’s work ethic doesn’t make you work harder.
• Every night when I’m falling asleep, I say to myself, I am relaxed, energized, and focused. I am calm, enthusiastic, and productive.
• I can use my awareness of my fear as a tool to help me make decisions that are truly in line with my values and purpose.
• We are all connected; to each other, biologically. To the Earth, chemically. And to the rest of the universe, atomically.
• studies by Albert Mehrabian showing that 55 percent of our communication is conveyed by body language, 38 percent is tone of voice, and a mere 7 percent is the actual words we speak.
• Sometimes we can trace our fears through the actions we take, and sometimes it’s the actions we’re reluctant to take
• If you follow your bliss, he said, doors will open for you that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else
• A bond has its own challenges—there can still be disagreement—but at least all parties want the same outcome.

• If you want a new idea, read an old book. —attributed to Ivan Pavlov (among others)
• When monks talk about happiness, they tell the story of the musk deer, a tale derived from a poem by Kabir, a fifteenth-century Indian mystic and poet. The musk deer picks up an irresistible scent in the forest and chases it, searching for the source, not realizing that the scent comes from its own pores. It spends its whole life wandering fruitlessly. In the same way we search for happiness, finding it elusive, when it can be found within us.
• Jim Carrey once said, I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of, so they can see that it’s not the answer.
• Clinging to temporary things gives them power over us, and they become sources of pain and fear. But when we accept the temporary nature of everything in our lives, we can feel gratitude for the good fortune of getting to borrow them for a time. Even the most permanent of possessions, belonging to the most wealthy and powerful, don’t actually belong to them. This is just as true for the rest of us.
• Becoming a monk is a mindset that anyone can adopt.
• Negativity is a trait, not someone’s identity.
• As researchers Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool underscore in their book Peak, mastery requires deliberate practice, and lots of it. But if you love it, you do it. Picasso experimented with other forms of art but kept painting as his focus. Michael Jordan did a stint at baseball, but basketball was where he really thrived. Play hardest in your area of strength and you’ll achieve depth, meaning, and satisfaction in your life.
• Finally, get involved in something that’s meaningful to you—a hobby, a charity, a political cause.
• En clase hablamos de esa reacción en cadena: cuando criticamos a otros, no podemos evitar fijarnos en lo malo de nosotros mismos; pero cuando buscamos el bien en los demás también empezamos a ver lo mejor de nosotros.
• Find me someone who has gone to the darkest parts of their own character where they were so close to their own self-destruction and found a way to get up and out of it, and I will bow on my knees to you.… You’re my teacher.
• A monk mind practices detachment. We realize that everything—from our houses to our families—is borrowed.
• be here now.
• recommend including in your practice: breathwork, visualization, and sound. All three have benefits, but the simplest way to differentiate them is to know that you do breathwork for the physical benefits—to find stillness and balance, to calm yourself; visualization for the psychological benefits—to heal the past and prepare for the future; and chanting for the psychic benefits—to connect with your deepest self and the universe, for real purification.
• Researchers have found that by the end of our lives, on average, each of us will spend thirty-three years in bed (seven years of which will be spent trying to sleep), a year and four months exercising, and more than three years on vacation.
• Schadenfreude,
• It is trust in the limits of the self that makes us open and it is trust in the gifts of others that makes us secure. We come to realize that we don’t have to do everything, that we can’t do everything, that what I can’t do is someone else’s gift and responsibility.… My limitations make space for the gifts of other people.
• Nuestros miedos no evitan la muerte, frenan la vida. BUDA
• As a monk, I learned early on that our values are influenced by whatever absorbs our minds. We are not our minds, but the mind is the vehicle by which we decide what is important in our hearts. The movies we watch, the music we hear, the books we read, the TV shows we binge, the people we follow online and offline. What’s on your news feed is feeding your mind. The more we are absorbed in celebrity gossip, images of success, violent video games, and troubling news, the more our values are tainted with envy, judgment, competition, and discontent.
• No one organ was more important than another; all of them worked in concert, and the body needed them all.
• feeling. Second, once a month you can approximate the change that I found at the ashram by going someplace you’ve never been before to explore yourself in a different environment. This can be anything from visiting a park or library you’ve never been to before to taking a trip. Finally, get involved in something that’s meaningful to you—a hobby, a charity, a political cause.
• Values are abstract, elusive, and the world we live in constantly pushes blatant and subliminal suggestions as to what we should want, and how we should live, and how we form our ideas of who we are.
• I am relaxed, energized, and focused. I am calm, enthusiastic, and productive.
• This is the first step to building your monk mind.
• For all of us there are activities in life that are competence-building and activities that are character-building. When I was first asked to give talks, I built competence in my dharma. But when I was asked to take out the trash, it built my character.
• I offer praise unto the all-pervading divinity present within every heart; who is the embodiment of beauty, intelligence, strength, wealth, fame, and detachment.
• Senses recklessly transport our minds away from where we want them to be. Don’t tease your own senses. Don’t set yourself up to fail. A monk doesn’t spend time in a strip club. We want to minimize the mind’s reactive tendencies, and the easiest way to do that is for the intellect to proactively steer the senses away from stimuli that could make the mind react in ways that are hard to control. It’s up to the intellect to know when you are vulnerable and to tighten the reins, just as a charioteer does when going through a field of tasty grass.
• To build your competence without regard for character is narcissistic, and to build character without working on skills is devoid of impact.

• May all beings everywhere be happy and free, and may the thoughts, words, and actions of my own life contribute in some way to that happiness and to that freedom for all.
• As long as we keep attaching our happiness to the external events of our lives, which are ever changing, we’ll always be left waiting for it.
• We can’t sit around with true intentions expecting that what we want will fall into our laps. Nor can we expect someone to find us, discover how amazing we are, and hand us our place in the world. Nobody is going to create our lives for us. Martin Luther King Jr., said, Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.
• Never trust [a] spiritual leader who cannot dance. When
• Revenge is the mode of ignorance—it’s often said that you can’t fix yourself by breaking someone else. Monks don’t hinge their choices and feelings on others’ behaviors. You believe revenge will make you feel better because of how the other person will react.
• so people who come to this place, stay here for a while, and then continue their journey. Sounds like a hotel to me.
• A senior monk once told me an old Cherokee story about these dilemmas which all of us agonize over: An elder tells his grandson, ‘Every choice in life is a battle between two wolves inside us. One represents anger, envy, greed, fear, lies, insecurity, and ego. The other represents peace, love, compassion, kindness, humility, and positivity. They are competing for supremacy.
• The cause of fear: attachment. The cure for fear: detachment.
• Fear does not prevent death. It prevents life.
• wish I’d expressed my love to the people I care about. I wish I hadn’t worked so much. I wish I’d taken more pleasure in life. I wish I’d done more for other people.
• No matter what you think your values are, your actions tell the real story. What we do with our spare time shows what we value. For instance, you might put spending time with your family at the top of your list of values, but if you spend all your free time playing golf, your actions don’t match your values, and you need to do some self-examination.
• People often equate detachment with indifference. They think that seeing things, people, and experiences as temporary or seeing them from a distance diminishes our ability to enjoy life, but that’s not the case. Only by detaching can we truly gain control of the mind.
• Which wolf wins?’ the grandson asks. ‘The one you feed,’ the elder replies. But how do we feed them? I asked my teacher. The monk said, By what we read and hear. By who we spend time with. By what we do with our time. By where we focus our energy and attention.
• Albert Einstein dijo: «Si no puedes explicar algo de forma sencilla es que no lo has entendido bien».
• if we think everyone is a reflection of ourselves, we fail to see things as they are. We see things as we are.
• OM TAT SAT The absolute truth is eternal.
• Here’s the irony: If you’ve ever pretended you know something, you probably discovered that it often takes the same amount of energy to feign confidence and feed vanity as it takes to work, practice, and achieve true confidence.
• Second, a bad grade in school doesn’t mean you get to ditch the subject altogether. We have to be careful not to confuse inexperience with weakness.
• Gavin de Becker, one of the world’s leading security experts, in The Gift of
• As monks, every time we completed an activity or thought exercise like the ones in this book, we asked ourselves questions: What did I like about that? Am I good at it? Do I want to read about it, learn about it, and spend a lot of my time doing it? Am I driven to improve? What made me feel comfortable or uncomfortable? If I was uncomfortable, was it in a positive way—a challenge that made me grow—or a negative way?
• Fear calls it a brilliant internal guardian that stands ready to warn you of hazards and guide you through risky situations. Often, we notice fear’s warning but ignore its guidance. If we learn how to recognize what fear can teach us about ourselves and what we value, then we can use it as a tool to obtain greater meaning, purpose, and fulfillment in our lives. We can use fear to get to the best of us.
• Recuerda: decir lo que queramos, cuando queramos y como queramos no es libertad. La auténtica libertad es no sentir la necesidad de decir esas cosas.
• Sangha significa «comunidad» en sánscrito y alude a un refugio en el que las personas se ayudan y se motivan mutuamente.
• We can’t stop our parents from dying, but we use the fear to remind us to spend more time with them.
• There are two lies some of us hear when we’re growing up. The first is You’ll never amount to anything. The second is You can be anything you want to be. The truth is— You can’t be anything you want. But you can be everything you are.
• Every choice in life is a battle between two wolves inside us. One represents anger, envy, greed, fear, lies, insecurity, and ego. The other represents peace, love, compassion, kindness, humility, and positivity. They are competing for supremacy.
• Judgment creates an illusion: that if you see well enough to judge, then you must be better, that if someone else is failing, then you must be moving forward. In fact, it is careful, thoughtful observations that move us forward
• I realized I had to take responsibility for my life. My parents might be upset, they might not—I had no control over that. I could only make decisions based on my own values.
• Kindness is as easy—and as hard—as this: genuinely wanting something good for someone else, thinking about what would benefit them, and putting effort into giving them that benefit.
• Every choice in life is a battle between two wolves inside us. One represents anger, envy, greed, fear, lies, insecurity, and ego. The other represents peace, love, compassion, kindness, humility, and positivity. They are competing for supremacy.’  ‘Which wolf wins?’ the grandson asks. ‘The one you feed,’ the elder replies.
• much more comfortable finding fault in other people and then forgiving it. We’re not used to admitting fault and taking responsibility for what we create in our lives.
• But how do we feed them? I asked my teacher. The monk said, By what we read and hear. By who we spend time with. By what we do with our time. By where we focus our energy and attention.
• learning never ends, so let’s keep reading!
• I became a Buddhist because I hated my husband.
• Sometimes we deny responsibility for the negativity that we ourselves put out in the world, but negativity doesn’t always come from other people and it isn’t always spoken aloud.
• Detachment is not that you own nothing, but that nothing should own you.
• Whatever action is performed by a great man, common men follow in his footsteps, and whatever standards he sets by exemplary acts, all the world pursues.
• Reflecting on the knowledge that we will die someday compels us to value the time we have and to spend our energy thoughtfully. Life’s too short to live without purpose, to lose our chance to serve, to let our dreams and aspirations die with us. Above all, I ask you to leave people and places better and happier than you found them.
• Gamma waves—those associated with attention, memory, learning, and happiness
• Appreciate everything, even the ordinary. Especially the ordinary.
• The researchers concluded that talking to yourself not only boosts your memory, it also helps you focus.
• If I sold more apples than you did yesterday, but you sold more today, this says nothing about whether I’m improving as an apple seller.
• helps you clarify your thoughts, tend to what’s important and firm up any decisions you’re contemplating.
• Our values are influenced by whatever absorbs our minds.
• What’s on your news feed is feeding your mind.
• A layperson who is consciously aiming to be continuously alive in the Now is a monk.
• Often all that holds us back from achieving the impossible is the belief that it is impossible.
• People complain about their poor memories, but I’ve heard it said that we don’t have a retention problem, we have an attention problem. By searching for the new, you are reminding your brain to pay attention and rewiring it to recognize that there’s something to learn in everything. Life isn’t as certain as we assume.

• Tracking my fear of exam results and the other branch fears that appeared led me to the root: fearing I couldn’t make my parents happy
• We have four different emotional reactions to fear: We panic, we freeze, we run away, or we bury it, as I had buried my anxiety about my parents. The first two are shorter-term strategies, while the second two are longer-term, but all of them distract us from the situation and prevent us from using our fear productively.
• Biosphere lacked a key element necessary to the trees’ health: wind
• When someone hurts you, it’s because they’re hurt. Their hurt is simply spilling over. They need help.
• No matter how much we grow, we are never free of daily chores and routines, but to be enlightened is to embrace them. The outside may look the same, but inside you are transformed.
• They are forever free who renounce all selfish desires and break away from the ego cage of I, me, and mine
• most of our communication is nonverbal.)
• Good thing, bad thing, who knows
• Removing distractions that prevent us from focusing on what matters most—finding meaning in life by mastering physical and mental desires. Some traditions give up speaking, some give up sex, some give up worldly possessions, and some give up all three. In the ashram, we lived with just what we needed and nothing more. I experienced firsthand the enlightenment of letting go. When we are buried in nonessentials, we lose track of what is truly significant.
• We’re willing to be present at certain times—during a favorite show or a yoga class, or even during the mundane task we’ve chosen to elevate—but we still want to be distracted when we choose to be distracted. We spend time at work dreaming about going on a beach vacation, but then, on the beach, long-awaited drink in hand, we’re annoyed to find that we can’t stop thinking about work.
• Your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody
• We don’t have to do everything, that we can’t do everything, that what I can’t do is someone else’s gift and responsibility.… My limitations make space for the gifts of other people
• Imagine you’re staying in the most beautiful Airbnb. It’s got a hot tub, chef’s kitchen, ocean views; it’s so beautiful and exciting. You don’t spend every moment there dreading your departure in a week. When we acknowledge that all of our blessings are like a fancy rental car or a beautiful Airbnb, we are free to enjoy them without living in constant fear of losing them.
• Pride of wealth destroys wealth, pride of strength destroys strength and in the same manner pride of knowledge destroys knowledge.
• Your dharma has to fill a need in the world
• No matter what anyone says about me today or how I think I’ve grown, I have anchors that humble me. They remind me of who I was and what I might have become if I hadn’t met people who inspired me to change.
• When you’re brushing, just brush. When you’re showering, just shower.
• The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said, We are all connected; to each other, biologically. To the Earth, chemically. And to the rest of the universe, atomically. Knowing this, we must look to the universe to find true meaning in our lives.
• Detaching inspires gratitude. When we let go of ownership, we realize that all we have done has been with the help of others: parents, teachers, coaches, bosses, books—even the knowledge and skills of someone who is self-made have their origins in the work of others. When we feel grateful for what we’ve accomplished, we remember not to let it go to our heads. Ideally, gratitude inspires us to become teachers and mentors in our own way, to pass on what we’ve been given in some form.
• The ignorant work for their own profit… the wise work for the welfare of the world… —Bhagavad Gita, 3:25
• When we are buried in nonessentials, we lose track of what is truly significant.
• You can’t be anything you want. But you can be everything you are.
• We are not our minds, but the mind is the vehicle by which we decide what is important in our hearts. The movies we watch, the music we hear, the books we read, the TV shows we binge, the people we follow online and offline. What’s on your news feed is feeding your mind. The more we are absorbed in celebrity gossip, images of success, violent video games, and troubling news, the more our values are tainted with envy, judgment, competition, and discontent.
• Higher values propel and elevate us toward happiness, fulfillment, and meaning. Lower values demote us toward anxiety, depression, and suffering.
• We hold on to ideas we have about ourselves, to the the material possessions and standard of living that we think define us, to the relationships we want to be one thing even if they clearly another.
• pride is the cause of the most damaging fall for the soul.
• A person who is actively opposed or hostile to someone or something, and a thing that harms or weakens something. Sometimes our own minds work against us. They convince us to do something, then make us feel guilty or bad about it, often because it’s gone against our values or morals.
• If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
• When we allow ourselves to have immersive experiences—through meditation, focused periods of work, painting, doing a crossword puzzle, weeding a garden, and many other forms of contemplative single-tasking—we’re not only more productive, we actually feel better.
• It is important to find our significance not from thinking other people have it better but from being the person we want to be.
• We have to be gardeners of our own lives, planting only the seeds of good intentions, watching to see what they become, and removing the weeds that spring up and get in the way.
• I hope this book has inspired you, and perhaps you will come away from it planning a fresh start. Maybe you’re thinking about how to change your routines, to listen to your mind in new ways, to bring more gratitude into your life, and more. But when you wake up tomorrow, things will go wrong. You might sleep through your alarm. Something will break. An important appointment will cancel. The universe isn’t going to suddenly give you green lights all the way to work.
• Fear. Thakura describes this as being driven by sickness, poverty, fear of hell or fear of death. Desire. Seeking personal gratification through success, wealth, and pleasure. Duty. Motivated by gratitude, responsibility, and the desire to do the right thing. Love. Compelled by care for others and the urge to help them. These
• Sister Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun, wrote, It is trust in the limits of the self that makes us open and it is trust in the gifts of others that makes us secure. We come to realize that we don’t have to do everything, that we can’t do everything, that what I can’t do is someone else’s gift and responsibility.… My limitations make space for the gifts of other people.
• So often we don’t take chances because we fear failure, and that often boils down to a fear of our egos getting hurt. If we can get past the idea that we’ll break if everything doesn’t go our way immediately, our capabilities expand exponentially.
• It helps to find a community that reflects who you want to be. A community that looks like the future you want.
• time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
• everything you do is your spiritual life.
• You don’t get to be a jerk just because you’re skilled.
• The study indicates that living within one mile of someone who becomes happier raises your likelihood of happiness by 25 percent.
• I had to reach back to my childhood to pinpoint why I felt unloved and unworthy. My paternal grandmother set the tone for this feeling. I realized she treated me differently because she didn’t like my mother. [I had to] forgive her even though she passed on already. I realized I was always worthy and always lovable. She was broken, not I.
• Letting go doesn’t mean wiping away negative thoughts, feelings, and ideas completely. The truth is that these thoughts will always arise—it is what we do with them that makes the difference. The neighbor’s barking dog is an annoyance. It will always interrupt you. The question is how you guide that response. The key to real freedom is self-awareness.
• You are who you are when no one is watching.
• Appreciate everything, even the ordinary. Especially the ordinary. —Pema Chödrön
• The vibrations from om have been shown to stimulate the vagus nerve, which decreases inflammation. Vagus nerve stimulation is also used as a treatment for depression, and researchers are looking at whether chanting om may have a direct effect on mood. (It’s already
• We have three core emotional needs, which I like to think of as peace, love, and understanding (thanks Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello). Negativity—in conversation, emotions, and actions—often springs from a threat to one of the three needs: a fear that bad things are going to happen (loss of peace), a fear of not being loved (loss of love), or a fear of being disrespected (loss of understanding). From these fears stem all sorts of other emotions—feeling overwhelmed, insecure, hurt, competitive, needy, and so on.
• We have no more idea of what life is really like than a chicken has before it hatches. Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain, are storms in a tiny, private, shell-bound realm which we take to be the whole of existence. It makes sense, then, that when the Buddha finally reached the realm utterly beyond the reach of thought, he described feeling like a chick breaking out of its shell.
• Along the way, I will introduce you to three very different types of meditation that I recommend including in your practice: breathwork, visualization, and sound. All three have benefits, but the simplest way to differentiate them is to know that you do breathwork for the physical benefits—to find stillness and balance, to calm yourself; visualization for the psychological benefits—to heal the past and prepare for the future; and chanting for the psychic benefits—to connect with your deepest self and the universe, for real purification.
• Competition breeds envy. In the Mahabharata, an evil warrior envies another warrior and wants him to lose all he has. The evil warrior hides a burning block of coal in his robes, planning to hurl it at the object of his envy. Instead, it catches fire and the evil warrior himself is burned. His envy makes him his own enemy.
• Someone had to invest their time, money, and energy to make you who you are today. Remember and give thanks to the people who gave you the skills you’re getting recognition for. Sharing the success with them keeps you humble.
• When we bluff our way through life, pretending to be who we are not, we end up looking worse than we truly are.
• I Am What I Think I Am
• Our teachers made a distinction between useful and hurtful fears. They told us that a useful fear alerts us to a situation we can change. If the doctor tells you that you have
• Every person is a world to explore.
• The fact that it was hard was an important part of the journey.
• The two things to remember are the bad we’ve done to others and the good others have done for us.
• Poor health because of your diet, and you fear disability or disease, that’s a useful fear because you can change your diet. When your health improves as a result, you eliminate your fear. But fearing that our parents will die is a hurtful fear because we can’t change the truth of the matter.
• The two things that we were told to forget are the good we’ve done for others and the bad others have done to us.
• Fear motivates us. Sometimes it motivates us toward what we want, but sometimes, if we aren’t careful, it limits us with what we think will keep us safe.
• People usually think that gratitude is saying thank you, as if this were the most important aspect of it. The most important aspect of the practice of grateful living is trust in life.… To live that way is what I call ‘grateful living’ because then you receive every moment as a gift.… This is when you stop long enough to ask yourself, ‘What’s the opportunity in this moment?’ You look for it and then take advantage of that opportunity. It’s as simple as that.
• The impulsive, desire-driven child mind is tempered by the judicious, pragmatic adult mind, which says, That’s not good for you, or Wait until later. The adult mind reminds us to pause and assess the bigger picture, taking time to weigh the default reaction, decide if it’s appropriate, and propose other options. The intelligent parent knows what the child needs versus what it wants and can decide what is better for it in the long term.
• At last I came to understand the value in it. The point of waking up early wasn’t to torture us – it was to start the day off with peace and tranquility. Birds. A gong. The sound of flowing water. And our morning routine never varied. The simplicity and structure of ashram morning spared us from the stressful complexity of decisions and variation. Starting our day so simply was like a mental shower. It cleansed us of the challenges of the previous day, giving us the space and energy to transform greed into generosity, anger into compassion, lost into love. Finally, it gave us resolve, a sense of purpose to carry out into the day.
• We think that complaining will help us process our anger, but research confirms that even people who report feeling better after venting are still more aggressive post-gripe than people who did not engage in venting.
• We transform hurtful fears into useful fears by focusing on what we can control. We can’t stop our parents from dying, but we use the fear to remind us to spend more time with them.
• When there is harmony between the mind, heart, and resolution then nothing is impossible.
• Instead of worrying what people will say, we filter what people will say. Instead of comparing ourselves to others, we cleanse our minds and look to improve ourselves. Instead of wanting to prove ourselves, we want to be ourselves, meaning we aren’t distracted by external wants. We live with intention in our dharma.
• Life is more meaningful when we define ourselves by our intentions rather than our achievements.
• The Monastic Way quotes Benedictine monk Dom Aelred Graham as saying, The monk may think he has come [to the monastery] to gain something for himself: peace, security, quiet, a life of prayer, or study, or teaching; but if his vocation is genuine, he finds that he has come not to take but to give.
• The ignorant work for their own profit… the wise work for the welfare of the world.
• What you run from only stays with you longer.
• Pick one thing to change, make it your number one priority, and see it through before you move on to the next.
• Every choice in life is a battle between two wolves inside us. One represents anger, envy, greed, fear, lies, insecurity, and ego. The other represents peace, love, compassion, kindness, humility, and positivity. They are competing for supremacy.’  ‘Which wolf wins?’ the grandson asks. ‘The one you feed,’ the elder replies. But how do we feed them? I asked my teacher. The monk said, By what we read and hear. By who we spend time with. By what we do with our time. By where we focus our energy and attention.
• Already I was being taught the most important lesson: to focus on the root of things, not the leaf of the tree or symptoms of the problem.
• Does this fit my chosen values or those that others have selected for me? Is this dust or is it me?
• All things are temporary and that we can’t truly own or control anything
• Do not give your attention to what others do or fail to do; give it to what you do or fail to do.
• Some tasks build competence, and some build character. The brainless activities annoyed me, but eventually I learned that doing an activity that was mentally unchallenging freed space for reflection and introspection. It was worthwhile after all.
• Thakura describes four fundamental motivations. Fear. Thakura describes this as being driven by sickness, poverty, fear of hell or fear of death. Desire. Seeking personal gratification through success, wealth, and pleasure. Duty. Motivated by gratitude, responsibility, and the desire to do the right thing. Love. Compelled by care for others and the urge to help them.
• Just be yourself.
• Everything you do in the day from washing to eating breakfast, having meetings, driving to work … watching television or deciding instead to read … everything you do is your spiritual life. It is only a matter of how consciously you do these ordinary things.
• Fear makes us fiction writers.
• There are distractions, of course, but meditation doesn’t eliminate distractions, distractions, it manages them.
• Write down all the noise you hear in your mind on a daily basis. Noise that you know you don’t want to have. This should not be a list of your problems. Instead, write the negative, self-defeating messages your mind is sending you, such as: You’re not good enough. You can’t do this. You don’t have the intelligence to do this. These are the times when the charioteer is asleep at the wheel.
• Don’t take everything personally—it is usually not about you.
• The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca observed that Our fears are more numerous than our dangers, and we suffer more in our imagination than reality.
• Location has energy; time has memory. If you do something at the same time every day, it becomes easier and natural.
• That’s not part of my job. But that’s part of me.
• Remembering your mistakes and forgetting your achievements restrains the ego and increases gratitude—a simple, effective recipe for humility.
• You do something in the same space every day, it becomes easier and natural.
• Good thing, bad thing, who knows,
• What belongs to you today, belonged to someone yesterday and will be someone else’s tomorrow.
• Another person might come in with a reason. They help you learn and grow, or they support you through a difficult time. It almost feels like they’ve been deliberately sent to you to assist or guide you through a particular experience, after which their central role in your life decreases.
• First, we will let go, stripping ourselves from the external influences, internal obstacles, and fears that hold us back. You can think of this as a cleansing that will make space for growth.
• You do breathwork for the physical benefits—to find stillness and balance, to calm yourself; visualization for the psychological benefits—to heal the past and prepare for the future; and chanting for the psychic benefits—to connect with your deepest self and the universe, for real purification.
• Your passion becomes a purpose when you use it to serve others. Your dharma has to fill a need in the world. 
• Material gratification is external, but happiness is internal.
• Most people are accustomed to looking for answers. Monks focus on questions. When I was trying to get close to my fear, I asked myself What am I afraid of? over and over again. When I’m trying to get to the root of a desire, I start with the question Why?
• Don’t judge the moment.
• Sachs says that while generally American incomes have risen since 2005, our happiness has fallen, in part because of social factors like declining trust in the government and our fellow Americans, and weaker social networks.
• But if we adopt a victim mentality, we’re more likely to take on a sense of entitlement and to behave selfishly.
• Our fears are more numerous than our dangers, and we suffer more in our imagination than reality.
• When we criticize others, we can’t help but notice the bad in ourselves. But when we look for the good in others, we start to see the best in ourselves too.
• We should challenge ourselves to dig to the root of negativity, to understand its origins in ourselves and those around us, and to be mindful and deliberate in how we manage the energy it absorbs.
• Detachment is not that you own nothing, but that nothing should own you. I love how this summarizes detachment in a way that it’s not usually explained.
• The four varnas are the Guide, the Leader, the Creator, and the Maker.

3 Jay Shetty Quotes on Life

Check these Jay Shetty quotes that’ll navigate life with more ease:

• Being present is the only way to live a truly rich and full life.
• The mud and muck of life’s challenges can provide fertile ground for our development. As the lotus grows, it rises through the water to eventually blossom.
• It’s a mistake to think that when we read a book, attend a class, and implement changes that we’ll fix everything. The externals will never be perfect, and the goal isn’t perfection. Life is not going to go your way. You have to go your way and take life with you. Understanding this will help you be prepared for whatever may come.

5 Instagram Jay Shetty Quotes

These Instagram Jay Shetty quotes make for the best inspirational captions:

• When you learn a little, you feel you know a lot. But when you learn a lot, you realize you know very little.
• Remember, saying whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want, is not freedom. Real freedom is not feeling the need to say these things.
• Cancers of the Mind: Comparing, Complaining, Criticizing.
• The more we define ourselves in relation to the people around us, the more lost we are.
• Our search is never for a thing, but for the feeling we think the thing will give us.

4 Jay Shetty Motivational Quotes

Check out these Jay Shetty motivational quotes to get through the rough times:

• As Pema Chödrön says, You are the sky. Everything else—it’s just the weather.
• Use an anti-anxiety technique called 5-4-3-2-1. We are going to find five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste.
• Kālidāsa, the great Sanskrit writer of the fifth century, wrote, Yesterday is but a dream. Tomorrow is only a vision. But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
• The grass is greener where you water it.

5 Jay Shetty Quotes on Love

Check out these Jay Shetty quotes on love to understand love a different perspective:

• We say things to ourselves that we would never say to people we love.
• Am happy about who I am becoming. I am open to all opportunities and possibilities. I am worthy of real love. I am ready to serve with all I have.
• Treat yourself with the same love and respect you want to show to others.
• You assume the love you receive will come from the person you gave it to. But it doesn’t always come from that person. Similarly, there are people who love you who you don’t give the same love in return.
• It makes sense that monks look at the distribution of love and care as a network of compassion rather than a one-to-one exchange.

5 Jay Shetty Quotes on Relationships

Here are some popular Jay Shetty quotes on relationships you need to check:

• Love is a gift without any strings attached. This means that with it comes the knowledge that not all relationships are meant to endure with equal strength indefinitely. Remember that you are also a season, a reason, and a lifetime friend to different people at different times, and the role you play in someone else’s life won’t always match the role they play in yours.
• Believe in your worth. You may undervalue yourself in the moment of a breakup, but your value doesn’t depend on someone’s ability to fully appreciate you. If you wrap your identity around the relationship, the pain you feel is that you’ve had to sacrifice that part of your identity. If you expected one person to fulfill all of your needs, then of course there is a vacuum when they’re gone. Now that you’re single, use this time to build a community of people with shared interests whom you want to be in your life forever. Make yourself whole. You need to be someone who makes you happy.
• When you try to live your most authentic life, some of your relationships will be put in jeopardy. Losing them is a risk worth bearing; finding a way to keep them in your life is a challenge worth taking on.
• Forgiving another person honestly and specifically goes a long way toward healing the relationship.
• Every time you move homes or take a different job or embark on a new relationship, you have a golden opportunity to reinvent yourself.

5 Jay Shetty Quotes on Gratitude

These Jay Shetty quotes on gratitude will help you the true worth of gratitude and thankfulness:

• According to the Gita, these are the higher values and qualities: fearlessness, purity of mind, gratitude, service and charity, acceptance, performing sacrifice, deep study, austerity, straightforwardness, nonviolence, truthfulness, absence of anger, renunciation, perspective, restraint from fault finding, compassion toward all living beings, satisfaction, gentleness/kindness, integrity, determination.
• For each of you, gratitude comes from realizing that someone else is invested in you. It’s a feedback loop of love.
• Let’s not make happiness and success about the size of our homes, but about the size of our hearts; let’s not make it about gratification but gratitude.
• The conscious practice of gratitude is the way out of the poverty mentality that erodes our gratitude and with it, our integrity.
• When you’re present in gratitude, you can’t be anywhere else.

9 Jay Shetty Think Like a Monk Quotes

Here are 10 quotes from Jay Shetty’s bestselling book “Think Like a Monk”:

• Our identity is wrapped up in what others think of us—or, more accurately, what we think others think of us.
• We try to live up to what we think others think of us, even at the expense of our values.
• Society’s definition of a happy life is everybody’s and nobody’s. The only way to build a meaningful life is to filter out that noise and look within.
• When we tune out the opinions, expectations, and obligations of the world around us, we begin to hear ourselves.
• The less time you fixate on everyone else, the more time you have to focus on yourself.
• Be honest about what your intention is. The worst thing you can do is pretend to yourself that you’re acting out of service when all you want is material success.
• Satisfaction comes from believing in the value of what you do.
• When people gain what they want but aren’t happy at all, it’s because they did it with the wrong intention.
• In getting you where you want to be, meditation may show you what you don’t want to see.

4 Jay Shetty Inspirational Quotes

Here are some Jay Shetty inspirational quotes to make your day:

• If you are satisfied with who you are, you don’t need to prove your worth to anyone else.
• To live intentionally, we must dig to the deepest why behind the want. This requires pausing to think not only about why we want something, but also who we are or need to be to get it, and whether being that person appeals to us.
• To walk down the same old path and find a new stone is to open your mind.
• When the fear of staying the same outweighs the fear of change, that is when we change.

4 Jay Shetty Quotes on Forgiveness

These Jay Shetty quotes on forgiveness will remind you the greatness of forgiveness:

• The pinnacle of forgiveness, true sattva, is to wish the person who caused you pain well.
• Sometimes we have been wounded so deeply that we can’t imagine how we might forgive the person who hurt us. But, contrary to what most of us believe, forgiveness is primarily an action we take within ourselves.
• Transformational forgiveness is linked to a slew of health improvements including: fewer medications taken, better sleep quality, and reduced somatic symptoms including back pain, headache, nausea, and fatigue.
• Forgiveness eases stress, because we no longer recycle the angry thoughts, both conscious and subconscious, that stressed us out in the first place.

7 Ego Jay Shetty Quotes

Check out these thought-provoking quotes on ego by Jay Shetty:

• Ego thinks it knows everything. Self-esteem thinks it can learn from anyone. The ego wants to prove itself. Self-esteem wants to express itself.
• Monks can withstand temptations, refrain from criticizing, deal with pain and anxiety, quiet the ego, and build lives that brim with purpose and meaning.
• The goal of monk thinking is a life free of ego, envy, lust, anxiety, anger, bitterness, baggage. To my mind, adopting the monk mindset isn’t just possible—it’s necessary. We have no other choice. We need to find calm, stillness, and peace.
• Always be alert to feedback that doesn’t come from the usual suspects. Some of the most useful feedback is unsolicited, even unintentional. Temper the ego by paying close attention to how people react to you nonverbally.
• Everyone has a story, and sometimes our egos choose to ignore that. Don’t take everything personally—it is usually not about you.
• The arrogant ego desires respect, whereas the humble worker inspires respect.
• None is less important than the others, and none of us is too important to do any chore. If you think you’re too good for something, you succumb to the worst egotistical impulses, and you devalue anyone who does that chore.

5 Jay Shetty Quotes on Success

Read these famous Jay Shetty quotes on success:

• We can take on more when we’re doing it for someone we love or to serve a purpose we believe in rather than from the misguided idea that we will find happiness through success. When we perform work with the conviction that what we do matters, we can live intensely.
• Humility comes from accepting where you are without seeing it as a reflection of who you are. Then you can use your imagination to find success.
• We think that success equals happiness, but this idea is an illusion.
• Eventually, I learned the one infallible trick to successfully getting up earlier: I had to go to sleep earlier. That was it. I’d spent my entire life pushing the limits of each day, sacrificing tomorrow because I didn’t want to miss out on today. But once I finally let that go and started going to sleep earlier, waking up at four became easier and easier.
• You are not your success or your failure.

4 Jay Shetty Friendship Quotes

Here are a few meaningful quotes on friendship by Jay Shetty:

• Mudita is the principle of taking sympathetic or unselfish joy in the good fortune of others. If I only find joy in my own successes, I’m limiting my joy. But if I can take pleasure in the successes of my friends and family—ten, twenty, fifty people!—I get to experience fifty times the happiness and joy. Who doesn’t want that?
• Make a list of five people you care about, but also feel competitive with. Come up with at least one reason that you’re envious of each one: something they’ve achieved, something they’re better at, something that’s gone well for them. Did that achievement actually take anything away from you? Now think about how it benefitted your friend. Visualize everything good that has come to them from this achievement. Would you want to take any of these things away if you could, even knowing that they would not come to you? If so, this envy is robbing you of joy. Envy is more destructive to you than whatever your friend has accomplished. Spend your energy transforming it.
• TRY THIS: AUDIT YOUR TIME Spend a week tracking how much time you devote to the following: family, friends, health, and self. (Note that we’re leaving out sleeping, eating, and working. Work, in all its forms, can sprawl without boundaries. If this is the case for you, then set your own definition of when you are officially at work and make extra work one of your categories.) The areas where you spend the most time should match what you value the most. Say the amount of time that your job requires exceeds how important it is to you. That’s a sign that you need to look very closely at that decision. You’re deciding to spend time on something that doesn’t feel important to you. What are the values behind that decision? Are your earnings from your job ultimately serving your values?
• I encourage you to purge or avoid physical triggers of negative thoughts and feelings, like that sweatshirt your ex gave you or the coffee shop where you always run into a former friend. If you don’t let go physically, you won’t let go emotionally.

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