Great pain, when it is honored from the heart, opens into great understanding.

The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there?

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.

The things that matter most in our lives are not fantastic or grand. They are the moments when we touch one another.

Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past. To come into the present is to stop the war.

We do not have to improve ourselves; we just have to let go of what blocks our heart.

Do not doubt your own basic goodness. In spite of all confusion and fear, you are born with a heart that knows what is just, loving, and beautiful.

In the end, just three things matter: How well we have lived How well we have loved How well we have learned to let go

Have respect for yourself, and patience and compassion. With these, you can handle anything.

Let go of the battle. Breathe quietly and let it be. Let your body relax and your heart soften. Open to whatever you experience without fighting.

The basic principle of spiritual life is that our problems become the very place to discover wisdom and love.

If only these walls could talk…the world would know just how hard it is to tell the truth in a story in which everyone’s a liar.

God is one and there is but one God — all else is but the way the ignorant seek to put Gods into a form they can understand...

The only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel.

You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them.

I like telling stories, and I tell stories that interest me. It would be boring to have to go to nothing but the best restaurants. That would be a misery to me.

The best years of a man's life are after he is forty. A man at forty has ceased to hunt the moon.

The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan.

Wise people are foolish if they cannot adapt to foolish people.

To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.

My dad once told me: no matter what anyone says or writes, really, none of those people have to hit your four- foot putt.You have to go do it yourself.