Meditation is not about doing something

We have to face the pain we have been running from. In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us.

Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.

Meditation practice is simply moving from a life of hurting myself and others to a life of not hurting myself and others.

But opinions, judgments, memories, dreaming about the future—ninety percent of the thoughts spinning around in our heads have no essential reality.

With unfailing kindness, your life always presents what you need to learn. Whether you stay home or work in an office or whatever, the next teacher is going to pop right up.

All I can be is who I am right now; I can experience that and work with it. That's all I can do. The rest is the dream of the ego.

It's of no use to look back and say, "I should have been different." At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we're able to see. For that reason, guilt is always inappropriate.

Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.

There is one thing in life that you can always rely on: life being as it is.

Practice has to be a process of endless disappointment. We have to see that everything we demand (and even get) eventually disappoints us. This discovery is our teacher.

He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn't sleep at all.

A conglomerate of complicated words, they confuse, condemn and cajole, created, he is sure, for the sole purpose of fuddling the listener, which in this case is regrettably him.

Secrets had the power to kill a marriage, she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said, it was secrets that could save a marriage.

If I don't believe it, then they don't need me on the court. I've just got to believe that in my heart.

Keep an open mind; it's the only way new things can get in.

What do I bring to the Democratic National Convention that other reporters don't? Hair.

You swore you wouldn't shout. If it's not your punch, then it's your pout.

Every offense is avenged on earth.

Through true love, you touch inner completeness.

They say our mothers really know how to push our buttons - because they installed them