None of us would choose to be Sisyphus; yet in a sense, we all are.

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.

She has been to the compound before. She remembered this hallway. She knows about the initiation process. My mother was Dauntless.

I don't know about my future but i guess it will better then my past.

I think the new generation is much more demanding about respect for the environment than we have ever imagined.

Willing is not enough, one must apply.

The “Vasco da Gama's era” ends in a nightmare in which men-Westerners and non-Westerners alike-are bewildered by this confusion and the old fancy of the apprenti sorcier becomes tragically actual.

I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings, and I don’t like to knock other writers as a matter of principle.

Breastfeeding is amazing; you can actually feel your stomach shrink with every feed.

The human hand is made complete by the addition of a baseball.

Now I see that God prefers to work through intermediaries - Mary and the saints. . . He wants us to pray through Mary and not only directly.

The courts are an easy scapegoat because at a time when everything has to boiled down to easy slogans, we speak in subtleties.