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.

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.

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.

Everything changes, but beauty remains.

It’s like a jolt of electricity, but worse.

Smart Technology is making us stupid.

We do not make beams from the hollow decaying trunk of the fallen oak. We use the upsoaring tree in the full vigor of its sap.

I didn't go to university, and so, every time that I work, I'm looking for a teacher in a way. I'm looking for people that I can learn from and to have the chance to work with people that I admire.

I must identify myself with Africa. Then I will have an identity.

A word or a smile is often enough to put fresh life in a despondent soul.

Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.

Can you be a girl for a few seconds?" "I'm always a girl" I frown. "You know what I mean. Like a silly, annoying girl" I twirl my hair around my finger. "Kay.

I was an okay singer. I was an okay dancer. But acting? Never could do it.