BKS Iyengar
Indian yoga master who, more than any other figure, shaped the global understanding of yoga as a precise, alignment-based postural practice. A frail child saved from tuberculosis by yoga, he studied with his brother-in-law T. Krishnamacharya and from 1937 taught yoga in Pune, India for over seven decades. His 1966 book Light on Yoga, the foundational reference of modern yoga, has sold over three million copies and been translated into more than nineteen languages. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. His exacting precision, his use of props (now standard equipment in nearly every yoga studio), and his deep philosophical grounding in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali made him both the great democratizer of yoga and one of its most rigorous teachers.
quotes in library
Quotes by BKS Iyengar
105 quotes“There is no end to learning. Be a student all your life.”
“Pose follows pose, breath follows breath, and life flows through.”
“The body is your child. Treat it with affection and care.”
“Practice creates intelligence in the body.”
“Awareness is the body's response to consciousness.”
“Inhalation is the embracing of the world by the self.”
“Exhalation is the offering of the self to the world.”
“The retention of breath in pranayama is the meditation in action.”
“Patanjali's eight limbs are not steps to climb but rooms to live in.”
“Yoga is not about touching your toes. Yoga is about what you learn on the way down.”
“Without philosophy, asana is mere acrobatics.”
“Without practice, philosophy is mere talk.”
“In every pose there is a beginning, a middle, and an end. The end is the same as the beginning of the next pose.”
“You cannot do yoga. Yoga is your natural state. What you can do are yoga exercises.”
“The yoga student must learn to be both teacher and student to herself.”
“Each asana is a question. Each breath is an answer.”
“Yoga is the art of arts and the science of sciences.”
“In the practice of yoga, the past is forgotten and the future does not yet exist. Only this breath, this moment.”
“Yoga is a light, which once lit will never dim. The better your practice, the brighter your flame.”
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