You can't live in paradise—but you are living right here. Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really.

Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were.

How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!

You can always improve your situation. But you do so by facing it, not by running away.

Compassion is the ability to see what needs doing right now and the willingness to do it right now.

You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.

The truth comes when you can see that your self-image is just a convenient reference point and nothing more, and that you as you had imagined yourself do not exist.

Do what you do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.

Truly compassionate action arises spontaneously without thought and is carried out in real action with no anticipation of reward and, indeed, no concept of a doer of that action.

Your role is to do and say the things that need to be done and said from your unique perspective.

Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.

At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]

Attention to health is life's greatest hindrance.

Think of the road as a kind of zone and a site of incredible diversity.

Jesus Christ was the ultimate influencer. My life has been influenced by Jesus more than anyone else.

In the end leaders are leaders. They get the credit and they get the blame.

There was the gaudy patch of sunflowers beside the west gate of the palace of the Prince of Ombria, that did nothing all day long but turn their golden-haired, thousand-eyed faces to follow the sun.

It is much easier to do something than to trust in God. That is why there are so few fellow workers with God and so many workers for Him. We would far rather work for God than believe in Him.

United States foreign policy, which includes national security, is literally disintegrating before our eyes.

There is nothing so confining as the prisons of our own perceptions.