The idea that there will be something spiritual or subtle, some sort of consciousness that can escape the collapse of the body and brain, is not very credible in the modern scientific worldview.

The origin of the conflict, frustration, and anxiety we experience does not lie in the nature of the world itself but in our distorted conceptions of the world.

Buddhism, I think, is probably facing the single most difficult transition from one historical epoch to another, which is really the transition to modernity.

Consciousness is an emergent, contingent, and impermanent phenomenon. It has no magical capacity to break free from the field of events out of which it springs.

While 'Buddhism' suggests another belief system, 'dharma practice' suggests a course of action. The four ennobling truths are not propositions to believe; they are challenges to act.

What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)

In taking life for granted, we fail to notice it.

The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities, and risks.

The greatest threat to compassion is the temptation to succumb to fantasies of moral superiority.

To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love.

This body is fragile. It is just flesh. Listen to the heartbeat. Life depends on the pumping of a muscle.

Future never desires to become a past.

The deepest realization of meditation is that your being is a non-being. It is a nothing, a vast emptiness without boundaries. It is a no-self. The feeling of self, of "I" is false.

Whatever gets you through the night

The one thing I never want to do is act drunk or act high. You don’t do it from a mental kind of place because then you’re just acting.

Everything good in a man thrives best when properly recognized.

The sea and wind can at the same time convey my neighbour's vessel and my own.

Pride sings and dances; humility sighs.

Civilization itself is housed in the human being.

Avoid compulsion and let early education be a matter of amusement. Young children learn by games; compulsory education cannot remain in the soul.

People are distracted by objects of desire, and afterward repent of the lust they've indulged, because they have indulged with a phantom and are left even farther from Reality than before.