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

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.

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.

To open deeply, as genuine spiritual life requires, we need tremendous courage and strength, a kind of warrior spirit.

It's difficult to carry the weight of responsibilities. But, it's more difficult to carry the weight of expectations.

Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.

Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cakehole.

A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting his neighbor's.

Nothing ever succeeds which exuberant spirits have not helped to produce.

The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.

So we have progressed to the point where we can move politicians around faster than light. I'm not sure I see the advantage.

always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you'll have to eat them, you can swallow it well.

Being a poet is like having an invisible partner. It isn't easy. But you can't live without it either. Talent is only 10 per cent. The rest is obsession.

America is a nation created by all the hopeful wanderers of Europe, not out of geography and genetics, but out of purpose.