Not getting our needs fulfilled is painful - but it's a sweet pain, not suffering, which is what comes from life-alienated thinking and interpretation.

Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need.

Your presence is the most precious gift you can give to another human being.

All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.

We are never angry because of what others say or do. It is our thinking that makes us angry.

Instead of playing the game "Making Life Wonderful", we often play the game called "Who's Right". Do you know that game? It's a game where everybody loses.

Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing.

People have been trained to criticize, insult, and otherwise communicate in ways that create distance among people.

You don't have to be brilliant. It's enough to become progressively less stupid.

Most of us grew up speaking a language that encourages us to label, compare, demand, and pronounce judgments rather than to be aware of what we are feeling and needing.

The most dangerous of all behaviors may consist of doing things 'because we're supposed to.

Like everything else, Fletcher. Practice.

I gave up drinking before my twentieth birthday. I haven’t touched the stuff since. And I’ve discovered that not everyone who does horrible things is a horrible person.

On the shining yards of heavenSee a wider dawn unfurled. . . . The eternal slaves of beautyAre the masters of the world.

Everyone has the spark of greatness

Jean Valentine and Jane Cooper were my professors at Sarah Lawrence College - and they were uncompromised in their art. They gave me models of how to live one's life as a poet.

Song ideas have come to me in the middle of interviews, in the shower, or while I'm writing another song.

Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.

Tribalism has become trendy.

Act your age don't pretend to be older than you are give yourself time to grow

Many things embarrass me, but reading isnt one of them. Im not ashamed of my slightly weird collection of prison memoirs. Nor the flaky meditation books. After all, I can pretend I never read those.