Abandon hope.

If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.

Without giving up hope—that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be—we will never relax with where we are or who we are.

A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us.

While we are sitting in meditation, we are simply exploring humanity and all of creation in the form of ourselves.

Patience is the training in abiding with the restlessness of our energy and letting things evolve at their own speed.

Words themselves are neutral. It's the charge we add to them that matters

Sitting meditation gives us a way to move closer to our thoughts and emotions and to get in touch with our bodies.

We can learn to act and think in ways that sow seeds of our future well-being, gradually becoming more aware of what causes happiness as well as what causes distress.

Pointing directly at your own heart, you find Buddha.

There isn’t any hell or heaven except for how we relate to our world. Hell is just resistance to life.

It is of course dangerous to set off an explosive device on a spacecraft.

There was nothing more I wanted to do than to see my dad react well to my music. I still do. I send him my demos all the time.

I think that an author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

I love artists like Prince, who hold on to that element of mystery.

I was really artistic. I did a lot of poetry, a lot of writing.

I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.

Our greatest ally in the Pakistan region of turmoil is the moderate Muslim majority, who we must reach out to and embrace if we ever are to have peace for our children.

One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds.

This is the place where anybody - like an African American kid raised by a single mom - can be president.

I secretly want to be a rapper.