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

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

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.

To open deeply, as genuine spiritual life requires, we need tremendous courage and strength, a kind of warrior spirit.

If I had a nickel for every time I'd wished I possessed the power to alter another person's mind, I'd be knee deep in nickels.

the price you pay for opening your eyes is the easy life you can no longer have. but it becomes worth it.

The time is always right to do what is right.

All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.

We are sitting on many powder kegs. Whether it's Ferguson, or St Louis, or like the other night, or Baltimore. Or different parts of Chicago.

One must renounce the bad taste of wishing to agree with many people.

To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.

The current days of the Internet will soon be over.

Be harsh with yourself at times.

I don't regret it, you know. I would do it all again. Children are our hope for the future." THERE IS NO HOPE FOR THE FUTURE, said Death. "What does it contain, then?" ME.