When the mind is still, we can become an instrument of peace.

A mind that is fast is sick. A mind that is slow is sound. A mind that is still is divine.

A calm mind releases the most precious capacity a human being can have: the capacity to turn anger into compassion, fear into fearlessness, and hatred into love.

Meditation is warm-up exercise for the mind, so that you can jog through the rest of the day without getting agitated or spraining your patience.

When someone at peace and free from hurry enters a room, that person has a calming effect on everyone present.

Patience can't be acquired overnight. It is just like building up a muscle. Every day you need to work on it.

Nothing really worth having comes quickly and easily. If it did, I doubt that we would ever grow.

Through meditation and by giving full attention to one thing at a time, we can learn to direct attention where we choose.

When we go slower, we are more patient and when we are more patient we have a choice in how we respond.

When we meditate every morning we are putting on armor for the day's battle against our own impatience, inadequacy, resentment, and hostility.

The real essentials of life - compassion, kindness, good will, forgiveness - are what is fundamental to living as a true human being.

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

[on his use of tracking shots throughout his 50-year career] There's always a certain amount of camera improvisation.

... good teachers, like Tolstoy's happy families, are alike everywhere.

I realized that the only purpose to revolution is to be able to love who you want, how you want, when you want and where you want.

Major social movements eventually fade into the landscape not because they have diminished but because they have become a permanent part of our perceptions and experience.

Whenever we dig down into the achievements of a creative artist, we invariably trace them to the beginning of all beginnings: labour.

Plants and flowers of the commonest kind can form a pleasing diary, because nothing which calls back to us the remembrance of a happy moment can be insignificant.

I've said it in the past and I'll say it again today: the vote is precious; it's almost sacred.

Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.

I was always trying to find the balance between trying my best and being an incredible parent. I literally realized that it was chaos - but it was happy chaos.