The goal of our life’s effort is to reach the other shore, Nirvana. Prajna paramita, the true wisdom of life, is that in each step of the way, the other shore is actually reached.

Leave your front door and your back door open. Allow your thoughts to come and go. Just don't serve them tea.

When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.

Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble. You yourself make the waves in your mind. If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm. This mind is called big mind.

Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.

If you can just appreciate each thing, one by one, then you will have pure gratitude. Even though you observe just one flower, that one flower includes everything

The most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your two feet.

Wherever you go you will find your teacher, as long as you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.

It must be obvious...that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

When my master and I were walking in the rain, he would say, 'Do not walk so fast, the rain is everywhere.'

There is no friendship that cares about an overheard secret.

To achieve anything you must be prepared to dabble on the boundary of disaster.

My brother's a teacher in Costa Rica and actually does a more important and significant job than I will ever do.

A great leader cannot worry about being well liked.

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and wonder if my life would be different if I had to do it over... Then a voice comes to me out of the dark that says, "boy, there's an original thought!

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

As truly as God is our Father, so truly God is our Mother.

Whether Jew or Gentile, I rank top percentile...

Doing a job RIGHT the first time gets the job done. Doing the job WRONG fourteen times gives you job security.

I think all of us feel like we're a bit on show, all the time.