If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self knowledge hasn’t begun.

More people are killed every year by pigs than sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk.

Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.

The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing: it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep.

It’s not our experiences that form us but the ways in which we respond to them.

Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves.

You must not be artful. Be your ordinary self…. You yourself as you are—that is Buddha Dharma. I stand or I sit; I array myself of I eat; I sleep when I am fatigued. The fool with mock me but the wise man will understand.

Life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally—and sometimes maddeningly—who we are.

When I first started racing, my father, one of the first things he said, he said, “Win the race as slow as you can.”

Gratitude empowers us to take charge of our emotional lives and, as a consequence, our bodies reap the benefits.

Without laughter life on our planet would be intolerable. So important is laughter to us that humanity highly rewards members of one of the most unusual professions on earth, those who make a living by inducing laughter in others. This is very strange if you stop to think of that: that otherwise sane and responsible…

Ten times a day something happens to me like this—some strengthening throb of amazement—some good sweet empathetic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.

Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.

Just be present. Don’t live from your conditioned mind, live from unconditioned truth.

Philosophy is properly homesickness; the wish to be everywhere at home.

“It’s like I told you last night, son. the earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight,” he added.

The essence of my optimism is constructive pessimism.

Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens.

Contentment is the greatest of all wealths that one can have.

Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that… shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on…

Growth is scary, because you’re a seed and you’re in the dark and you don’t know which way is up, and down might take you down further into a darker place…

From the very beginning, all beings are Buddha.

We came up with Earth Day so we would have one day every year that would remind us what planet we were living on.

Your thoughts are your message to the world, just as the rays are the messages of the Sun.

Appreciation can turn our planet into a sacred home and our communities into extended family.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

You gotta lose ’em some of the time. When you do, lose ’em right.

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.

A champion is someone who gets up with he can’t.

What do happy people have in common? They appreciate what they have.