Quotes about yoga
A collection of quotes on the topic of yoga, life, doing, people.
Quotes about yoga

“Yoga does not just change the way we see things, it transforms the person who sees.”
Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p. 61

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p. 59-60

“Yoga allows you to find a new kind of freedom that you may not have known even existed.”
Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p.xiv

“When I play music, that is my best yoga, the best meditation, the best prayer.”
Music is a Prayer:An interview with Hariprasad Chaurasia by Ian Gottstein

"Avril: Bad girl turned good", interview with Calgary Sun (June 2005)

Lecture on The Nectar of Devotion - Bombay, December 27, 1972. Vanipedia http://vaniquotes.org/wiki/Anyone_you_love,_you_see_always_within_your_heart._Similarly,_if_you_have_love_for_God,_Krsna,_then_you_can_see_Krsna_always._That_is_called_yoga_system
Quotes from other Sources, Quotes from other Sources: Loving God

After having read a French translation of the Bhagavad Gita given to her by an Indian who had “advised her to envisage Krishna as the immanent Godhead, as the Divine within ourselves, quoted in "Paris (1897-1904)", and in II. PARIS (1897-1904), Sri Aurobindo's Ashram http://www.motherandsriaurobindo.org/Content.aspx?ContentURL=_staticcontent/sriaurobindoashram/-04%20centers/india/pondicherry/sri%20aurobindo%20society/wilfried/The%20Mother%20-%20A%20Short%20Biography/-005_Paris%20(1897-1904).htm.

In Birth and Girlhood http://www.searchforlight.org/TheMother_lifeSketch1.htm, during her childhood days in when she was aware of her special purpose of life, her mission on earth, and also in On the Mother Divine by Pasupati Bhattacharya (1968) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=1loqAAAAYAAJ, p. 10

“You become writer by writing . It is a yoga .”
Source: Magic Rises

“Yoga is the cessation of the movements of the mind. Then there is abiding in the Seer's own form.”
Patanjali, in “Yoga and You” [citation needed]
Source: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p.xiv
30 September 1982.
The Teachings of Babaji

“Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured.”
Source: Nancy Hine The Depression Trap: Ten Ways to Set Yourself Free http://books.google.co.in/books?id=7PxT2AJS_H4C&pg=PA61, Red Raft Publishing LLP, 2008, p. 61

The Uttarpara Address (1909)

When asked for a motivational advice — Reddit "The Reigning Queen of TV" here. Also known as "mom." Gillian Anderson here, AMA." https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/20cavl/the_reigning_queen_of_tv_here_also_known_as_mom/#cg1tob1 (March 13, 2014)
2010s

Source: BKS Iyengar – obituary http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11045993/BKS-Iyengar-obituary.html, The Telegraph, 20 August 2014

Yoga: The Hatha Yoga and the Raja Yoga http://books.google.co.in/books?id=2sDu6Xmkh2cC&printsec=frontcover, p. backcover

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.xiii

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.xiii

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.x

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p. 28
"Vegan…but not “one of those”" http://www.celebritysportsspeaker.com/vegan/noot/, in his website CelebritySportsSpeaker.com (May 28, 2018).

Sadhana - spiritual practice
Source: "I am That." P.74.

Source: The Dawn of Indian Music in the West http://books.google.co.in/books?id=OSZKCXtx-wEC&pg=PA46, A&C Black, 24 April 2006, p. 46

Jennifer Beals on yoga (Date unknown) http://jennifer-beals.com/media/press/yoga.html.

§ 158
Agni Yoga (1929)

Radio 2 Show - 13th January 2007
Radio 2 Show (2007–2008)

The Lords and the New Creatures: Poems (1969), The Lords: Notes on Vision

Quoted in Kelsie Besaw, The Little Red Book of Yoga Wisdom, Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, p. 22 http://books.google.it/books?id=4BeNAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT22.

Light on Life: B.K.S. Iyengar's Yoga Insights

April, 1920, Letter to Barin Ghose, Sri Aurobindo's brother, Translated from Bengali
India's Rebirth
Karma yoga
Source: The Teachings of Babaji, 4 February 1984.
“Train your children in karma yoga that they may become people of good and strong character.”
Karma yoga
Source: The Teachings of Babaji, 31 August 1983.

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.x-xi

Source: Paul G. Balch, Jaylee Balch The Energetic Anatomy of a Yogi: Healing the Emotional and Mental Body Through Yoga http://books.google.co.in/books?id=BdDtAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA23, Strategic Book Publishing, 2013, p. 23

Interview in The Vegetarians by Rynn Berry (Brookline, MA: Autumn Press, 1979), pp. 166-167.

" The Butterfly Effect http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/436/the_butterfly_effect". Interview by Leslee Goodman for The Sun, April 2012, issue 436

Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, W. Trask, trans. (Princeton: 1969), pp. 95–96.

As quoted in "Paris (1897-1904)", and in Bulletin, Volume 53 by the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (Pondicherry, India) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=VMzWAAAAMAAJ

Lights on Yoga (1935)

Light on Life: B.K.S. Iyengar's Yoga Insights

Wall Street Journal, WSJ http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/04/04/rahul-gandhi-speech-hits-some-dud-notes/

Light on Life: B.K.S. Iyengar's Yoga Insights

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.xvii

On living in Seattle in the 1990s, The Seattle Times http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/courtney-love-lsquoit-was-war-the-time-after-kurt-diedrsquo/ (14 July 2013)
2006–2013

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p.xv
Vindicated by Time: The Niyogi Committee Report (1998)

Yoga and Vipassana: An Integrated Lifestyle (2012) https://books.google.co.in/books?id=sBsG9V1oVdMC,

Source: BBC News "India yoga guru BKS Iyengar dies"
On the left wing
A Big, Steaming Pile Of Me

I said, "Of course!"
After doing yoga and sadhana with Sri Aurobindo, the Mother experienced a visible physical change, quoted in " Pondicherry http://www.searchforlight.org/TheMother_lifeSketchpart6.htm, also in The Mother: The Story of Her Life - George Van Vrekhem (2000) http://books.google.co.in/books?id=On_XAAAAMAAJ, p. 201

Interview in Sharon Gannon and David Life, Jivamukti Yoga, Ballantine Books, 2002, p. 83 http://books.google.it/books?id=D_9oFtc1ZLMC&pg=PA83.

Miscellaneous

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.x

“Ahhh. Samadhi.
Yoga is Samadhi.
God is One.
Yoga is One.
That's all.”
Quoted in Sharon Gannon and David Life, Jivamukti Yoga, Ballantine Books, 2002, p. 37 http://books.google.it/books?id=D_9oFtc1ZLMC&pg=PA37.

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.xi

Source: Sushama Londhe in “A Tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and Wisdom Spanning Continents and Time about India and Her Culture”, p. 341

Source: Tennis Week "The Tennis Week Interview: Sania Mirza"
Source: The Bhagavadgītā (1973), p. 52. (27. Yoga)

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, P.xi

Undated
India's Rebirth

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p. 13

B. K. S. Iyengar, Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West, Dies at 95

Source: The Yellow Book, 1974, concerning smoking and yoga path, p.6

Source: Ashtanga Yoga Primer, 1981, p.5

Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
Sourced from newspapers and magazines
Context: Hata yoga is a way of working with the body, disciplining the body, purifying the body, preparing the body for higher levels of energy. All of us are alive; all of us are human beings, sitting here. But all of us do not experience life to the same intensity because our energy levels are not the same. Our pranic energies are not the same. Different people experience life in different levels of intensity. -Sadhguru

Revolution (2014)
Context: It was a bizarre experience visiting him in there. Not least because I, as was the custom at the time, went to the powwow armed with a yoga teacher. I was hanging out with her a lot. I took her along to the MTV Movie Awards, which I was hosting, where at one point—perhaps the summit of my own personal Everest of Hollywood kookiness—she vetoed a joke from my opening monologue. It wasn’t unspiritual or mean; I think it was about Jennifer Aniston. It was cut “for time,” like the monologue was saggy. I don’t know if that makes it less weird. Tej, her name was, and she was a bloody good kundalini yoga teacher, and the lessons and techniques definitely induced interesting states of mind. Most people would’ve left it at that, but with my tendency for extremism, I first became teacher’s pet and then, in a macabre switcheroo, made the teacher into my pet. I’ve already told you I’m a sucker for a mystic costume. I’m like a wartime gal with a thing for uniforms, swooning at a G. I., and Tej’s get-up was world-class. Kundalini practitioners dress entirely in white—why not? They also wear a turban as the yogic practice they follow is derived from the Sikh faith. Tej was a lovely woman and we became good friends; I learned a lot and had a good laugh. A fair amount of that fun may have been derived, I realize in retrospect, from the novel thrill of turning up at unexpected places with a yogi. Like the MTV Movie Awards or the Ecuadorian embassy. During the production of my let’s call it experimental—with the emphasis on the “mental”—TV show Brand X (surely the last punning derivation my surname can provide), the whole of Tej’s yoga class, which consisted of about one hundred people, was uprooted and placed each morning at the studio where the show was recorded. That’s pretty mad, isn’t it? We left the comfort, tranquillity, sweet smells, and fine foods of the purpose-built yoga center to practice yoga in the functioning canteen of a TV production facility. Sometimes when you’re famous you can get away with being a lunatic. Especially if you’re like me and think the system is corrupt and rules have to be broken and conformity challenged. Before too long, you have a scenario where the teamsters who do all the heavy lifting on a TV show are confronted with the daily spectacle of a hundred yoga devotees descending on their canteen.

Source: Psychotherapy, East and West (1961), pp. 3-4

Revolution (2014)
Context: "I don’t see myself as a yoga person or a man who meditates and prays and eats well and says “Namaste” or “God bless you.” I became that because I exhausted all other options. There was a point, I’ll admit, when I flung myself full force into an L. A. New Age lifestyle. I’d just got divorced, and a movie I wanted to do well didn’t meet my expectations. My response to this was to stop shaving and start wearing pajamas outdoors. That is relatively typical behavior for any lunatic; we see them everywhere—twitching, twisting, hollering at their imagined foes. The difference is I was doing it in Hollywood and my pajamas looked suitably ethnic, so I think I got away with it. Although my mates have subsequently told me they were worried and, thinking about it, they did drop hints like “Trim your beard, you look like a shoe bomber” and “Stop wearing them gap-year trousers, you fuckin’ nut,” but I was immune. A friend of mine, himself no stranger to mental illness, and that’s putting it lightly—he’s a right fucking fruitcake, living at his mum’s on disability benefits—said to me, “In India if you have a mental breakdown, they don’t build you back up again; they leave you in communion with God.” He then looked up, mimicking, I supposed, an Indian yogi, and raised his hands and eyes skywards as if he were playing a tiny accordion just in front of his hairline. “They say, ‘Ah, he’s in conversation with Brahman now,’ and they revere you. In this country they just give you a bus pass.”

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Book I, 1999
Context: Yoga is defined as a method – the process of nirodha (mental control) – by which union (the goal of yoga) is achieved. Yoga is therefore both the process of nirodha and the unqualified state of niruddha (the perfection of that process). The word yoga (union) implies duality (as in joining of two things or principles); the result of yoga is the nondual state..., or as the union of the lower self and higher Self. The nondual state is characterized by the absence of individuality; it can be described as eternal peace, pure love, Self-realization, or liberation. (Sutra 2, Bk I, p.5)

Revolution (2014)
Context: There is always something for it to think, always something for it to solve, so whenever I first start to meditate, the mantra is a tiny clear droplet lost in a deluge of sludge. I’m not a person who finds meditation a doddle or to whom yoga comes naturally. To tell you the truth, I find the whole business a bit poncey and contrary to the way I used to see myself. It’s only the fact that I decimated my life by aggressively pursuing the models of living that were most immediately available—eating, wanking, drinking, consuming, getting famous—that I was forced to look at alternatives.

Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

“Yoga is defined as a method – the process of nirodha”
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Book I, 1999
Context: Yoga is defined as a method – the process of nirodha (mental control) – by which union (the goal of yoga) is achieved. Yoga is therefore both the process of nirodha and the unqualified state of niruddha (the perfection of that process). The word yoga (union) implies duality (as in joining of two things or principles); the result of yoga is the nondual state..., or as the union of the lower self and higher Self. The nondual state is characterized by the absence of individuality; it can be described as eternal peace, pure love, Self-realization, or liberation. (Sutra 2, Bk I, p.5)

Isha Insights Magazine, Spring Edition 2009
Sourced from newspapers and magazines
Source: Meditations. Yogas, Gods, Religions (2000), p. 86
Source: Meditations. Yogas, Gods, Religions (2000), p. 31

Foreward to The Secret Oral Teachings in the Tibetan Buddhist Sects (1964)], by Alexandra David Neel

Patanjali, in East of existentialism: the Tao of the West http://books.google.co.in/books?id=2WyyAAAAIAAJ, p. 266.