We are just living this moment; we don't have to live 150,000 moments at once. We are only living one. That's why I say you might as well practice with each moment.

We have to face the pain we have been running from. In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us.

Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.

Meditation practice is simply moving from a life of hurting myself and others to a life of not hurting myself and others.

But opinions, judgments, memories, dreaming about the future—ninety percent of the thoughts spinning around in our heads have no essential reality.

With unfailing kindness, your life always presents what you need to learn. Whether you stay home or work in an office or whatever, the next teacher is going to pop right up.

All I can be is who I am right now; I can experience that and work with it. That's all I can do. The rest is the dream of the ego.

It's of no use to look back and say, "I should have been different." At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we're able to see. For that reason, guilt is always inappropriate.

Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.

There is one thing in life that you can always rely on: life being as it is.

Practice has to be a process of endless disappointment. We have to see that everything we demand (and even get) eventually disappoints us. This discovery is our teacher.

When I wake up, I look to God.

Build your life not on what you see today but on the things of tomorrow

A garden without cats, it will be generally agreed, can scarcely deserve to be called a garden at all.

The day when the scientist, no matter how devoted, may make significant progress alone and without material help is past. This fact is most self-evident in our work.

The last place I would ever want to go is prison.

A lot of women - not all of them, a lot of them - feel insecure about men being men.

A little and a little, collected together, becomes a great deal; the heap in the barn consists of single grains, and drop and drop make the inundation.

Museums have these great collections and the reality is they attract a regional audience not a national audience.

You're able to love others, to give to others, and do for others by giving and doing for yourself first.

It is no more possible to live in the future than it is to live in the past. If life is not now, it is never.