What good are thoughts and emotions-in fact all of our experiences-if not to increase our realization?

When we trust our creativity we encounter a supreme kind of enjoyment - an amazement at the natural unfolding of life beyond our ordinary way of looking at things.

Melting our attachment to self is the most powerful medication for bringing mental and emotional imbalances in check.

The experience of emptiness is not found outside the world of ordinary appearance, as many people mistakenly assume. In truth, we experience emptiness when the mind is free of grasping at appearance.

Seeing that nothing is solid or permanent you begin to make yourself at home in the unknown.

A mantra is like meeting the Buddha or Bodhisattva himself.

The longing for happiness and freedom from suffering expresses the great natural potential of mind.

You as a salt-being, made of salt, go to fathom the depth of the ocean, and in the process you yourself dissolve. A great maharishi once said that true meditation is like this.

When we look in the mirror, the one thing we don't want to see is an ordinary human being.

Thoughts and emotions will always arise.

Whatever you do, do with love to be the success and to find the joy.

O Lord, as I walk through the valley of the shadow of doubt, at least let mewear a Walkman...

It never occurred to me that anyone would name a nuclear missile "Peacekeeper". It never occurred to me that thousands of people would be killed in the name of "peace-keeping".

Men aren't really complicated. They are very simple, literal creatures. They usually mean what they say. And we spend hours trying to analyze what they've said, when really it's obvious.

E pur si muove. "Albeit It does move". (That's what Galileo purportedly muttered after torturers forced him to recant his theory that the earth orbits the sun.)

Sometimes what we think is a disappointment, is really God getting us in position to go to a new level.

I got to trumpet, finally. That's why I love to write for brass, and [Count] Basie and [Frank] Sinatra and all that stuff, 'cause that's just like part of my DNA.

There are parts of me I only recognize from photographs.

If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both.