When you try to stop activity ...

When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity your very effort fills you with activity.
When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity your very effort fills you with activity.
 Sengcan

More phrases

Being self-made is a state of mind, and once you put that mentality to work, your success will come.
 Dave East
A lot of people change for good. Some people just fall off. Just trying to progress in anything, no matter what you're doing, I feel like any progression you make... some people aren't gonna be around you that were around you.
 Dave East
We are in a survival mentality, and that's hard-wired into our humanity, because we are the winners of an evolutionary struggle of millions and millions and millions of years.
 John Shelby Spong
I've always had the mentality of: work hard, get to bed early, focus - and let your work speak for itself.
 Olivia Palermo
If a warrior is to succeed at anything, the success must come gently, with a great deal of effort but with no stress or obsession.

Quotes from the same author

The great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When like and dislike are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction however and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.
 Sengcan
The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease.
 Sengcan
For the unified mind in accord with the Way all self-centered striving ceases. Doubts and irresolutions vanish and life in true faith is possible. With a single stroke we are freed from bondage; nothing clings to us and we hold nothing. All is empty, clear, self-illuminating, with no exertion of the mind's power.
 Sengcan
Do not try to drive pain away by pretending it is not real. If you seek serenity in oneness, pain will vanish of its own accord.
 Sengcan
One thing, all things: move among and intermingle, without distinction. To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non-perfection. To live in this faith is the road to non-duality, because the non-dual is one with the trusting mind.
 Sengcan