Breathe in deeply to bring your mind home to your body. Then look at, or think of, the person triggering this emotion: With mindfulness, you can see that she is unhappy, that she is suffering. You can see her wrong perceptions. You can see that she is not beautiful when she says things that are unkind.

Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.

We have a tendency to condemn people who are different from us, to define their sins as paramount and our own sinfulness as being insignificant.

We’re always looking over our shoulders, ‚what they will think, what the press will think, what will this one – am I making the right career move?‘ When you’re young you have to do all that to survive, I suppose.

People who fly into a rage always make a bad landing.

I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.

One mustn’t close one’s eyes to difficulty and to shortcomings; the more one recognizes them, the less they upset one.

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.

Many people would be surprised that, in fact, I’m quite shy.

Find joy and solace in the simple, and cultivate your utopia by feeling the Tao in every cubic inch of space.

People should not make me out to be like Jesus; I don’t walk on water.

To accuse others for one’s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.

The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.

A faithful woman can become a devoted daughter of God – more concerned with being righteous than with being selfish, more anxious to exercise compassion than to exercise dominion, more committed to integrity than to notoriety. And she knows of her own infinite worth.

Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn’t anyone who doesn’t appreciate kindness and compassion.

I never think about myself as an artist working in this time. I think about it in macro.

If you get your ego in your way, you will only look to other people and circumstances to blame.

People like to build their own story about my life. I don’t know if it makes them feel better, or if it makes it okay for them to not like me, but the last thing I grew up as was rich.

I’ve learned that usually, the less I know about other people, the better off I am.

There’s people constantly asking you for something on set, so the multi-tasking of motherhood transfers very well to being a director. And I think you’re compassionate.

I’m not a natural born performer.

To be social is to be forgiving.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

Peace begins with a smile.

We will be more successful in all our endeavors if we can let go of the habit of running all the time, and take little pauses to relax and re-center ourselves. And we’ll also have a lot more joy in living.

The incomparable greatness of the religions of the East lies in their having been second to none in vibrating with the passion for unity. This note, which is essential to every form of mysticism, has even penetrated them so deeply that we find ourselves falling under a spell simply by uttering the names of their Gods.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

My mother told me, ‚Son, nobody else but God knows.‘ And that’s what I’m about – reaching out to the people, crying with them, giving them hope. Visiting the hospital, visiting the kids with cancer, visiting the adults, and stuff like that. That’s what I do.

By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep, and alive.

I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t matter. As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to do some good.

Being at ease with not knowing is crucial for answers to come to you.

To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.

Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life.

It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life.

I realized, ‚Yo, I can’t do anything in moderation. I don’t know how.‘

We should take care not to make the intellect our goal; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

I’m not good at talking about myself.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury; but if you injure him you will always remember.

Forget the past.

To realize that you do not understand is a virtue; Not to realize that you do not understand is a defect.

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.

Self-knowledge comes from knowing other men.

Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

A great hallmark of mental wellness is the ability to be in the present moment, fully and with no thoughts of being elsewhere.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

I’m not happy all the time, and I wouldn’t want to be because that would make me a shallow person. But I do try to find the good in everybody.

At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.

I’m as skeptical as anyone would be about celebrities and causes – and I will dare to say to you that I don’t think of myself as a celebrity per se.

Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.

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

Love begins by taking care of the closest ones – the ones at home.

Confession of errors is like a broom which sweeps away the dirt and leaves the surface brighter and clearer. I feel stronger for confession.

With fame, you know, you can read about yourself, somebody else’s ideas about you, but what’s important is how you feel about yourself – for survival and living day to day with what comes up.

I was inspired to spend an entire year – my 65th year – reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.