It's crazy to me how concerned people get with what it looks like and what you can do there. People may as well be talking about JRR Tolkien or Star Trek or something.

Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were.

How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!

You can always improve your situation. But you do so by facing it, not by running away.

Compassion is the ability to see what needs doing right now and the willingness to do it right now.

You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.

The truth comes when you can see that your self-image is just a convenient reference point and nothing more, and that you as you had imagined yourself do not exist.

Do what you do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.

Truly compassionate action arises spontaneously without thought and is carried out in real action with no anticipation of reward and, indeed, no concept of a doer of that action.

Your role is to do and say the things that need to be done and said from your unique perspective.

Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.

Frightfully pale and perpetually odd

To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life not the top.

There's no genetic basis for any kind of rigid ethnic or racial classification. I'm always asked is there Greek DNA or an Italian gene, but, of course, there isn't. We're very closely related.

Future leaders will be less concerned with saying what they will deliver and more concerned with delivering what they have said they would.

If we would know whether our faith is genuine, we do well to ask ourselves how we are living.

"Yield" was completed in 1997 and released in 1998. In the spring of 1997, I had made a decision to stop taking medications that I had been taking daily since 1988.

I can play the air guitar really, really well.

Rock is very, very important and very, very ridiculous.

Sitting with the woman of your dreams and forgetting what her name is.

Never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.