Part of spiritual and emotional maturity is recognizing that it's not like you're going to try to fix yourself and become a different person. You remain the same person, but you become awakened.

The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there?

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.

The things that matter most in our lives are not fantastic or grand. They are the moments when we touch one another.

Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future; in regrets, guilt or shame about the past. To come into the present is to stop the war.

We do not have to improve ourselves; we just have to let go of what blocks our heart.

Do not doubt your own basic goodness. In spite of all confusion and fear, you are born with a heart that knows what is just, loving, and beautiful.

In the end, just three things matter: How well we have lived How well we have loved How well we have learned to let go

Have respect for yourself, and patience and compassion. With these, you can handle anything.

Let go of the battle. Breathe quietly and let it be. Let your body relax and your heart soften. Open to whatever you experience without fighting.

The basic principle of spiritual life is that our problems become the very place to discover wisdom and love.

That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.

My heart and soul are in the Stratocaster

I learned to appreciate repetition. That's why I can dance. It's how I learned to act. I have a high tolerance for repetition.

Beauty may be the object of liking--great qualities of admiration--good ones of esteem--but love only is the object of love.

While knowledge may provide useful point of reference, it cannot become a force to guide the future.

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation.

It's not just the abuse of power that's the problem. It's the power to abuse.

I do think that the kind of writing that I do will always be around and printed in books, magazines, and now blogs.

You know, party every day until 6 a.m. and then sleep during the day.

...All my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.