The state of ambiguity - that messy, greasy, mixed-up, confused, and awful situation you're living through right now - is enlightenment itself.

Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were.

How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!

You can always improve your situation. But you do so by facing it, not by running away.

Compassion is the ability to see what needs doing right now and the willingness to do it right now.

You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.

The truth comes when you can see that your self-image is just a convenient reference point and nothing more, and that you as you had imagined yourself do not exist.

Do what you do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.

Truly compassionate action arises spontaneously without thought and is carried out in real action with no anticipation of reward and, indeed, no concept of a doer of that action.

Your role is to do and say the things that need to be done and said from your unique perspective.

Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.

Meditation is blossoming of the prefrontal cortex to overcome the momentum of the nature. It is coming out of the loops of memories, patterns, fears, dreams and anger.

I think that my leadership style is to get people to fear staying in place, to fear not changing.

Freedom of belief and worship is the most important guarantee of social peace.

If we do not design policies to halt, and then reverse population growth, Nature by default will soon exact a most punishing solution

I make no distinction between poetry and painting.

Happiness may be found only by helping others to find it.

The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.

Man with frailty is allied by birth.

The kitchen of the body darkens the lives of lovers. Fasting came to enlighten them.

A little water clears us of this deed.