In taking the everyday details of life for granted, we fail to appreciate the extraordinary fact that we are conscious at all.

The origin of the conflict, frustration, and anxiety we experience does not lie in the nature of the world itself but in our distorted conceptions of the world.

Buddhism, I think, is probably facing the single most difficult transition from one historical epoch to another, which is really the transition to modernity.

Consciousness is an emergent, contingent, and impermanent phenomenon. It has no magical capacity to break free from the field of events out of which it springs.

While 'Buddhism' suggests another belief system, 'dharma practice' suggests a course of action. The four ennobling truths are not propositions to believe; they are challenges to act.

What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)

In taking life for granted, we fail to notice it.

The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities, and risks.

The greatest threat to compassion is the temptation to succumb to fantasies of moral superiority.

To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love.

This body is fragile. It is just flesh. Listen to the heartbeat. Life depends on the pumping of a muscle.

Life teaches us the right path is rarely the easy one.

You're nobody's rainbow. You're nobody's princess. You're nobody's doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.

Life is beautiful.. Enjoy the life when it is beautiful only...

The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one's life.

Justice divine has weighed: the doom is clear. All hope renounce, ye lost, who enter here.

Jealousy is a grievous passion that jealously seeks what causes grief.

There are so many health food nuts out there that eat nothing but natural foods but they don't exercise and they look terrible.

Routine is really important. However late you went to bed the night before, or however much you had to drink, get up at the same time each day and get on with it.

Every few years something new breaks into the circle of my thoughts.

It is better to make mistakes than to lie idle.