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.

Body tension will always be present if our good feeing is just ordinary, self-centered happiness. Joy has no tension in it, because joy accepts whatever is as it is.

Encouragement is like water to the soul, it makes everything grow.

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.

You carry the image of God in you

Happiness is a journey that starts with you. If you can’t find it within you, it will be logically impossible for you to make others around you happy.

The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.

Networking is not about hunting. It is about farming. It's about cultivating relationships. Don't engage in 'premature solicitation'. You'll be a better networker if you remember that.

Controlling the mind is the way to attain internal harmony.

I really think it's important that my beliefs don't impinge upon what you get from the movie. It's your opinion that matters and it's far more interesting than mine.

We are trying to prove that the blues lives on forever and anybody in this place can sing the blues.

I enjoy my work too much to force-feed myself with pressure.