Unless you make tremendous efforts, you will not be convinced that effort will take you nowhere. The self is so self-confident that unless it is totally discouraged it will not give up. Mere verbal conviction is not enough. Hard facts alone can show the absolute nothingness of the self-image.

~ Sri Nisargadatta

It is only through silent awareness that our physical and mental nature can change. This change is completely spontaneous. If we make an effort to change we do no more than shift our attention from one level, from one thing, to another. We remain in a vicious circle. This only transfers energy from one point to another. It still leaves us oscillating between suffering and pleasure, each leading inevitably back to the other. Only living stillness, stillness without someone trying to be still, is capable of undoing the conditioning our biologoical, emotional and psychological nature has undergone. There is no controller, no selector, no personality making choices. In choiceless living the situation is given the freedom to unfold. You do not grasp one aspect over another for there is nobody to grasp. When you understand something and live it without being stuck to the formulation, what you have understood dissolves in your openness. In this silence change takes place of its own accord, the problem is resolved and duality ends. You are left in your glory where no one has understood and nothing has been understood.

~ Jean Klein "I Am"

Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation. Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing. And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.

~ Sogyal Rinpoche

[The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying]

Do not try to keep quiet, do not make being quiet into a task to be performed. Don't be restless about being quiet, miserable about being happy.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

He is beginning to master wisdom when he tries to learn how not to try.

~ Paul Brunton

True discipline is really just self-remembering; no forcing or fighting is necessary.

~ Charles Eisenstein

The world is made of rings. The hooks are all yours.
Make straight your hooks and nothing can hold you.
Give up your addictions. There is nothing else to give up.
Stop your routine of acquisitiveness, your habit of looking for results
and the freedom of the universe is yours. Be effortless.

~ Nisargadatta

All effort at controlling thoughts, appetites and desires
cannot but strengthen them along with the ego. What-
ever has to go must fall off by itself. All that you are
concerned with, all that you are, is the impersonal
functioning of understanding. So let that understanding
work through witnessing without judgment, knowing that
there is nothing else that you can do.

- Ramesh S. Balsekar

Trying to understand is like straining
to see through muddy water.
Be still, and allow the mud to settle.

~ Tao Te Ching

There are no conditions to fulfil. There is nothing to be done, nothing to be given up. Just look and remember, whatever you perceive is not you, nor yours. It is there in the field of consciousness, but you are not the field and its contents, nor even the knower of the field. It is your idea that you have to do things that entangles you in the results of your efforts - the motive, the desire, the failure to achieve, the sense of frustration - all this holds you back. Simply look at whatever happens and know that you are beyond it.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

When effort is needed, effort will appear.
When effortlessness becomes essential,
it will assert itself. You need not push
life about. Just flow with it and give
yourself completely to the task of the
present moment, which is the dying now
to the now. For living is dying. Without
death life cannot be.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

Be aware of being conscious and seek the
source of consciousness. That is all. Very
little can be conveyed in words. It is the
doing as I tell you that will bring light, not
my telling you. The means do not matter much;
it is the desire, the urge, the earnestness that
counts.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj

A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen
rightly, once your mind is quiet. As the sun on
rising makes the world active, so does self-awareness
affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and
steady self-awareness, inner energies wake up and
work miracles without any effort on your part.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj

Enlightenment is total emptiness of mind.
There is nothing you can do to get it.
Any effort you make can only be an
obstruction to it.
- Ramesh S. Balsekar

We think that there is something hiding our
reality and that it must be destroyed before the
reality is gained. It is ridiculous. A day will dawn
when you will yourself laugh at your past efforts.
That which will be on the day you laugh is also
here and now.
- Sri Ramana Maharshi