We are all just walking each other home.

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

Practice meditation, and by and by your mind will be so calm and fixed that you will find it hard to keep away from meditation.

Learn to give to each other, and then slowly that learning will expand to the whole universe.

If we want to become enlightened, we simply have to acknowledge or recognize what is.

Sometimes we are lucky enough to know that our lives have been changed, to discard the old one, embrace the new, and run headlong down and immutable course.

From just one candle, you can light a million candles without putting strain on the first candle. From one awakened being, you can set light into a million souls, so powerful is the light.

Over periods of 10,000 years the distinctions between Western and Eastern and African cultures lose all meaning. Over a time span of 100,000 years we are all Africans. And over time span of 300 million years we are all amphibians, waddling uncertainly out of dried up ponds onto the alien and hostile land.

Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.

Keep your body under proper control, your gaze concentrated upon One, and the peace of God will descend upon you.

When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

The moment we decide to stop and look at what is going on (like a swimmer suddenly changing course to swim upstream instead of downstream), we find ourselves battered by powerful currents we had never even suspected—precisely because until that moment we were largely living at their command.

In your hopelessness is the only hope, and in your desirelessness is your only fulfillment, and in your tremendous helplessness suddenly the whole existence starts helping you.

No matter how dark the cloud, there is always a thin, silver lining, and that is what we must look for.

Don’t you think they are maybe the same thing—love and attention?

When we are aware of our soul, we perceive the inner life that surpasses our ego and that has profound affinities with the Whole.

In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.

You have to understand the purpose of life. The purpose of life is to do something which will live forever.

When we don’t ask, we don’t let others give. When we fear rejection, we don’t let generosity arise.

In a single gaze, we should / see the whole cosmic garden: / in a single breath, feel it / in a single listen, hear it / in a single mouthful, taste it / and through our body alone, touch it.

Breathing in, I establish myself in the present moment. Breathing out I know that this is a wonderful moment.

Know this, heart speaks to heart, in secret.

Have you noticed that whatever sport you’re trying to learn, some earnest person is always telling you to keep your knees bent?

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. And don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already…

Many paths lead from / The foot of the mountain, / But at the peak / We all gaze at the / Single bright moon.

The roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence…. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live…

When you have achieved a state of calmness and readiness, then you are ready to know, ready to understand in a deep way the dance between emptiness and appearance.

Tasting, seeing, experiencing, living—all these demonstrate that there is something common to enlightenment experience and our sense experience; the one takes place in our innermost being, the other on the periphery of our consciousness. Personal experience thus seems to be the foundation of Buddhist philosophy.

If you cling to appearances while searching for meaning, you won’t find a thing.