I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present. God has given me no control over the moment following.

Let us sacrifice our today so that our children can have a better tomorrow.

I fear that too many have sadly surrendered their agency to the adversary and are saying by their conduct, ‚I care more about satisfying my own desires than I do about bearing the Savior’s power to bless others.‘

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains.

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate… but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

Don’t say I hate institutionalised religion – rather than saying I hate those things, which I do not, what I’m saying is that perhaps there is a way of opening more doors, rather than closing so many.

Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.

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 believe that having a spiritual life is so important in everybody’s life.

Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us… While what we call ‚our own life‘ remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make ‚our own life‘ less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?

The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.

Those who are free of resentful thoughts surely find peace.

Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones.

I am a simple Buddhist monk – no more, no less.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

I’ve reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, and I can’t do anything to change events anyway.

When the mind is empty, silent, when it is in a state of complete negation – which is not blankness, nor the opposite of being positive, but a totally different state in which all thought has ceased – only then is it possible for that which is unnameable to come into being.

Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.

At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn’t exist except as a part of everything.

There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself.

Remind yourself that winning an argument or proving your point really gets you nowhere in the long run. Win through your actions, not your words.

Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That’s what surfers do – take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we’ve become incredibly adept technically. We’ve treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part.

Sometimes I just sit still and enjoy God’s presence.

Whether you like it or not, you’re forced to come to the realisation that death is out there. But I don’t fear death, I’m a fatalist. I believe when it’s your time, that’s it. It’s the hand you’re dealt.

Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.

The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

Often, little situations trigger enormous reactions. Be there, present for it. Your partner will find it easier to see it in you, and you will find it easier to see it in them.

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

God just has a way of working things out the way he wants to and you have no say in that.

If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange in a bad way. And it could be that there are a whole lot of dead, one-planet civilisations.

I just want to live happily ever after, every now and then.

I don’t know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.

A lot of dumb pictures have made a lot of money, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to be anything cinema students will revel over in the future.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot – past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

Commodities such as gold and silver have a world market that transcends national borders, politics, religions, and race. A person may not like someone else’s religion, but he’ll accept his gold.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

You can’t stop everything from happening. But we’ve gotten to a point where we’re certainly trying. If a car doesn’t have four hundred air bags in it, then it’s no good.

We’ve gotta become the Martians. I’m a Martian – I tell you to become Martians. And we’ve gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever.

We have the resources to build room for a trillion humans in this solar system, and when we have a trillion humans, we’ll have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts. It will be a way more interesting place to live.

The gigantic tension before the shooting of an arrow, and the total relaxation seconds later, is my way of connecting to the universe.

I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature.

You don’t have to give way to careless speech or complaining. You don’t have to let your feelings get in the way of what God wants to do in your life.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.

It’s certainly not wrong to want to be a better person. God gave us that desire.

I do have a lot of gays in my family now, but some will never come out.

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

Someday I want to have children and give them all the love I never had.

If you truly get in touch with a piece of carrot, you get in touch with the soil, the rain, the sunshine. You get in touch with Mother Earth and eating in such a way, you feel in touch with true life, your roots, and that is meditation. If we chew every morsel of our food in that way we become grateful and when you are grateful, you are happy.

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

I think Buddhism should open the door of psychology and healing to penetrate more easily into the Western world.