Anger is like a storm rising up from the bottom of your consciousness. When you feel it coming, turn your focus to your breath.

Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby?

For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.

I don’t worry about stress. I create it.

I was very depressed when I was 19… I would go back to my apartment every day and I would just sit there. It was quiet and it was lonely. It was still. It was just my piano and myself. I had a television and I would leave it on all the time just to feel like somebody was hanging out with me.

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

Never take anything for granted.

Sometimes I lose my temper.

A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants.

Be a force of love as often as you can and turn away negative thoughts whenever you feel them surface.

It’s been proven by quite a few studies that plants are good for our psychological development. If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down. Torture victims begin to recover when they spend time outside in a garden with flowers. So we need them, in some deep psychological sense, which I don’t suppose anybody really understands yet.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

Before you start a goal – let’s take care of our insecurities because they are going to surface when you put yourself in the crucible and you’re suffering.

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.

I think the most important thing is to keep active and to hope that your mind stays active.

It makes no sense to worry about things you have no control over because there’s nothing you can do about them, and why worry about things you do control? The activity of worrying keeps you immobilized.

I briefly did therapy, but after a while, I realised it is just like a farmer complaining about the weather. You can’t fix the weather – you just have to get on with it.

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

I don’t think I get angry.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

If you have the insight of non-self, if you have the insight of impermanence, you should make that insight into a concentration that you keep alive throughout the day. Then what you say, what you think, and what you do will then be in the light of that wisdom and you will avoid making mistakes and creating suffering.

Sometimes I catch myself stooping, and whenever I am like that, I am sure something is not quite right.

If I couldn’t laugh I just would go insane, If we couldn’t laugh we just would go insane, If we weren’t all crazy we would go insane.

Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.

Silence is a source of great strength.

Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.

I talk to myself all the time. Just make sure you answer.

He who angers you conquers you.

I don’t have to chase extraordinary moments to find happiness – it’s right in front of me if I’m paying attention and practicing gratitude.

Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences.

I’ve got a terrible memory; it’s probably because I’m always concentrating on what I’m doing now.

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know – and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.

In a disordered mind, as in a disordered body, soundness of health is impossible.

Enlightenment is always there. Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment. If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive – that you can touch the miracle of being alive – then that is a kind of enlightenment.

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.

Control thy passions lest they take vengence on thee.

All of our problems start in our minds.

I don’t try to control my days.

The story with anorexic girls – nobody works with anorexic girls. That has nothing to do with fashion.

Day by day we should weigh what we have granted to the spirit of the world against what we have denied to the spirit of Jesus, in thought and especially in deed.

If you want to be a voice for peace in the world, begin by making peace a permanent condition of your own life.

It is possible to live happily in the here and the now. So many conditions of happiness are available – more than enough for you to be happy right now. You don’t have to run into the future in order to get more.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.

Let everyone try and find that as a result of daily prayer he adds something new to his life, something with which nothing can be compared.

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.

To me, it’s OK to have differences. But we don’t have to be mad about it. You know? And I think that’s where sometimes we get so passionate that we – you know, it turns into anger.

I’m kind of claustrophobic… It’s not even like enclosed spaces. It’s like I hate being stuck in one band, you know? Just being stuck is the biggest drag, for fear that, you know, just that you can’t get out.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

We can’t just continue living as if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow.

I think the discipline comes with turning that cellphone and Blackberry off and unplugging completely. You do that and you go through some withdrawals in the beginning. You start thinking, ‚Oh, do I need to do this? Do I need to do that?‘ You forget that we were doing just fine with the payphone.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.

True happiness is… to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.