If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality.

No one can live without relationship. You may withdraw into the mountains, become a monk, a sannyasi, wander off into the desert by yourself, but you are related. You cannot escape from that absolute fact. You cannot exist in isolation.

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

We need to try to unite audiences, unite countries, join musical tastes, unite people.

When you take your attention into the present moment, a certain alertness arises. You become more conscious of what’s around you, but also, strangely, a sense of presence that is both within and without.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

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

We need to reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion. This isn’t a matter of political correctness. It’s a matter of understanding what makes us strong. The world respects us not just for our arsenal; it respects us for our diversity and our openness and the way we respect every faith.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

Don’t wait to be successful at some future point. Have a successful relationship with the present moment and be fully present in whatever you are doing. That is success.

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.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

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.

Cultivation to the mind is as necessary as food to the body.

Today different ethnic groups and different nations come together due to common sense.

My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

God’s love is too great to be confined to any one side of a conflict or to any one religion.

Have you not noticed that love is silence? It may be while holding the hand of another, or looking lovingly at a child, or taking in the beauty of an evening. Love has no past or future, and so it is with this extraordinary state of silence.

If you aren’t in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret.

The Oslo Accords in 1993 determined that the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are a single territorial entity which cannot be divided. Immediately, the United States and Israel set about separating the two and making sure that they would not be united.

I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively.

Peace can be contributed to by respect for our ability in defense.

We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter, and we will not fail. Peace and Freedom will prevail.

For a while… to be an evangelical meant you were a white Republican, and you were against this and against that. I don’t want to be put into that mold, because then people judge you before they even listen… I don’t want to divide the very people I am trying to reach.

The happiness and peace attained by those satisfied by the nectar of spiritual tranquillity is not attained by greedy persons restlessly moving here and there.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

When I’m dancing, I’m not thinking about anything. I am here. I am totally there. You know? And the feeling is a sensation of being away from myself. My soul dances with the angels, and my body dances with my wife.

I don’t keep people around me that aren’t family. You don’t get to stay. Unless you’re eating at the table with us, you’re not part. We eat together, we cry together, we live together, we die together. Everything that we do is for each other, and we care for another.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace.

For Christians, who believe they are created in the image of God, it is the Godhead, diversity in unity and the three-in-oneness of God, which we and all creation reflect.

We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.

A peace is of the nature of a conquest; for then both parties nobly are subdued, and neither party loser.

Avoid popularity if you would have peace.

In the morning, I practice 15 minutes of yoga.

Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.

Peace is one of the most precious gifts God has promised His children. I know, because for many years my life was not peaceful, and I was miserable.

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.

Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes.

I have a scheme for stopping war. It’s this – no nation is allowed to enter a war till they have paid for the last one.

One of the good things about the way the Gulf War ended in 1991 is, you’d see the Vietnam veterans marching with the Gulf War veterans.

To know yourself as the Being underneath the thinker, the stillness underneath the mental noise, the love and joy underneath the pain, is freedom, salvation, enlightenment.

I see the face of a child. He lives in a great city. He is black. Or he is white. He is Mexican, Italian, Polish. None of that matters. What matters, he’s an American child.

He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees.

When we give ourselves the chance to let go of all our tension, the body’s natural capacity to heal itself can begin to work.

That government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.

Love… it surrounds every being and extends slowly to embrace all that shall be.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

Great tragedy has come to us, and we are meeting it with the best that is in our country, with courage and concern for others because this is America. This is who we are.

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.

Revenge, lust, ambition, pride, and self-will are too often exalted as the gods of man’s idolatry; while holiness, peace, contentment, and humility are viewed as unworthy of a serious thought.

If we want to fight people in the world, we should fight them with pillows – pillows stuffed with food, medicine, music… That would be so much cheaper than bombs.

Engage your brain before you engage your weapon.

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.

And suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension.

When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out.

We will always be a family. Always.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‚blackness‘ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.