I like to let things breathe.

What a nice night for an evening.

We humans have lost the wisdom of genuinely resting and relaxing. We worry too much. We don’t allow our bodies to heal, and we don’t allow our minds and hearts to heal.

A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world.

Most people treat the present moment as if it were an obstacle that they need to overcome. Since the present moment is life itself, it is an insane way to live.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

I’m perpetually lonely.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

What a liberation to realize that the ‚voice in my head‘ is not who I am. ‚Who am I, then?‘ The one who sees that.

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.

We are dying from overthinking. We are slowly killing ourselves by thinking about everything. Think. Think. Think. You can never trust the human mind anyway. It’s a death trap.

Sometimes, getting up in the morning and brushing your teeth is the hardest part of the day – it all just hurts.

My body is like breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don’t think about it, I just have it.

I go through a lot of depression, and I know other people do, too, but I have an outlet that so many people don’t. If you have that inside of you and can’t get it out, what do you do?

A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings, and learn how by his own thought to derive benefit from his illnesses.

I found that with depression, one of the most important things you could realise is that you’re not alone.

Compassionate listening is to help the other side suffer less. If we realize that other people are the same people as we are, we are no longer angry at them.

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

It is better to be alone than in bad company.

I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don’t have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.

Keep silence for the most part, and speak only when you must, and then briefly.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

I don’t carry the burden of the past or the madness of the future. I live in the present.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

My general attitude to life is to enjoy every minute of every day. I never do anything with a feeling of, ‚Oh God, I’ve got to do this today.‘

Usually, people have a tendency to be caught in the worries concerning the future or in the regret concerning the past. There is some kind of energy that is pushing them to run, and they are not able to establish themselves in the present moment.

I admire people who destroy themselves.

Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.

Meditation is difficult for many people because their thoughts are always on some distant object or place. One form of meditation is to label the thought as it appears and then choose to let it go.

I’m gonna go hard no matter what because I gotta feed my family, and I gotta feed myself.

A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.

You will be as much value to others as you have been to yourself.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Patience is key for getting over a breakup. That, and trailing off your interaction after the breakup.

I hesitate to use a pathologizing label, but underneath the so-called narcissistic personality is definitely shame and the paralyzing fear of being ordinary.

The only thing that relaxes me is archery. That’s why I have to have apartments with gardens.

Let not your mind run on what you lack as much as on what you have already.

Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.

Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It’s a black wall. It’s a thief.

I am two with nature.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

We never look deeply into the quality of a tree; we never really touch it, feel its solidity, its rough bark, and hear the sound that is part of the tree. Not the sound of wind through the leaves, not the breeze of a morning that flutters the leaves, but its own sound, the sound of the trunk and the silent sound of the roots.

Whenever the speech is corrupted so is the mind.

Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul.

Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.

Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you.

We’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.

Buddhism teaches us not to try to run away from suffering. You have to confront suffering. You have to look deeply into the nature of suffering in order to recognize its cause, the making of the suffering.

The man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly entitled.

I wouldn’t say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I’d like my fear emotion to be less because it’s very distracting and fries my nervous system.

I never do anything that I don’t want to do.

Freedom is not given to us by anyone; we have to cultivate it ourselves. It is a daily practice… No one can prevent you from being aware of each step you take or each breath in and breath out.

Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking.

He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.

The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.

Every day is a gift from God. There’s no guarantee of tomorrow, so that tells me to see the good in this day to make the most of it.

Keeping an active mind has been vital to my survival, as has been maintaining a sense of humor.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.