You have to start where you are. There is nothing wrong with being where you are—it’s one of the infinite experiences available to us.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

Eyes see only light, ears hear only sound, but a listening heart perceives meaning.

If you miss the present moment, you miss your very appointment with life. That is very serious!

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

The sound of a helicopter is really annoying until you’re drowning, and it’s there to rescue you. Then it sounds like music.

Don’t drink by the water’s edge. Throw yourself in. Become the water. Only then will your thirst end.

Meditate on the Self as being / Vast as the sky / A body of energy / Extending forever in all directions / Above, below, all around.

When the time is on you… start and the pressure will be off.

Maybe the truth can’t be buried. Or maybe it can’t stay buried. Maybe the very nature of truth is that it will ultimately reveal itself.

One good teacher outweighs a ton of books.

A civilization must be judged and assessed, not by the level of power it has reached, but by how it develops and expresses a love of humanity through its laws and institutions.

There is no need to search for Grace. Without it, you would not be alive.

Love is not liking somebody. Anyone can do that. Love is loving things that sometimes you don’t like.

…what is important is the way that we are violent, not the reason for it.

The cause that brings about effortless presence is emptying out and letting go. You have to be without clinging.

Just practice good, do good for others, without thinking of making yourself known so that you may gain reward…. This is the primary requisite for breaking free of attachments to the Self.

I hate advice unless I’m giving it. I hate giving advice, because people won’t take it.

It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. Resign yourself to be the fool you are.

One who possesses kindness possesses courage, but one who possesses courage is not necessarily kind.

When you can’t stand the endless cycle of suffering anymore, you begin to Awaken.

There is tremendous power in unearthing, in recognizing distracted, scattered mind, the mind which would rather be anywhere but here, and spending some time there, with that mind. Rather than being an anonymous voice from the dark bossing you around, scattered mind is someone you can sit down and hang out with.

We can only learn to love by loving.

When it comes to the arts, passion should always trump common sense.

One you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.

Do not let what you think they think of you make you stop and question everything you are.

We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we’ve gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don’t know what it is we’re…

I have lived on the lip / Of insanity, wanting to know the reasons, / Knocking on the door. / It opens. / I’ve been knocking from the inside.

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now—always.

The universe is shot through in all parts by a single sort of love.