I wish I had the gift of religious faith. Sometimes I long to believe in a structured universe designed purposefully for mankind.

We have to live within the framework of our limitations and the mistakes we make. Argue with Destiny, but never try to wrestle it into submission. If you do, you’ll end up losing.

I don’t enjoy surprises that compel me to renegotiate my relationship with the past.

Stop trying to be a magician. The past won’t come back. It likes its safety in memory.

I suspect each of us uses the past to prop up the bruised present. It’s a clumsy try for the comfort of normality.

When you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger.

Of course some days are easier than others, but my worst day is better than being in most humdrum occupations.

That dichotomy between the public consumption of the work and my intent and practice in making it is an uneasy one for me, on occasion.

Love is as strong as death, as hard as Hell. Death separates the soul from the body, but love separates all things from the soul.

Success is buried in the garden of failure.

The winding down of summer puts me in a heavy philosophical mood.

I was coerced into taking piano lessons in the early '50s. It was a quite unpleasant experience.

Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the greatest teachers of our time. He reaches from the heights of insight down to the deepest places of the absolutely ordinary.

Rampant technolgy eliminates luxury, but not by declaring privilege a human right; rather, it does so by both raising the general standard of living and cutting off the possibility of fulfilment.

This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation.