I’ve always felt quite singular, even as a child. That I must stay on track to keep my purpose.

I even found it difficult to watch myself playing on TV because I couldn’t identify with the person on the screen. I couldn’t get to grips with it. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.

I had one incident where my daughter said that a girl asked if she was a brown person. I said, ‚We’re black. You have black people, white people, Chinese people, Hispanic people; we’re all brought up differently.‘

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.

There are some teams and logos you see, no matter where you are in the world, and you know exactly who they are and what they mean.

Life, if well lived, is long enough.

When you are discontent, you always want more, more, more. Your desire can never be satisfied. But when you practice contentment, you can say to yourself, ‚Oh yes – I already have everything that I really need.‘

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

I like to recede away from classifications. You might say that indicates a fundamental lack of commitment. I suppose that’s true to some degree.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes when they look upon his own person.

I wake up in the morning and my heart is light, man. It’s not heavy. I don’t have skeletons in the closet on their way out.

We cannot live being obsessed with what other people think about us. It’s impossible to live like that. Not even God managed to please the entire world.

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

Be content to seem what you really are.

You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.

The little man is still a man.

Sometimes I’m a bit under-aggressive and sometimes a bit over. But I think it’s good to have both.

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

Nothing is more intolerable than to have to admit to yourself your own errors.

If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

When you learn about the teaching and the practice of another tradition, you always have a chance to understand your own teaching and practice.

You may be always victorious if you will never enter into any contest where the issue does not wholly depend upon yourself.

So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.

Too often in life, something happens and we blame other people for us not being happy or satisfied or fulfilled. So the point is, we all have choices, and we make the choice to accept people or situations or to not accept situations.

By the sole fact of his entering into ‚Thought,‘ man represents something entirely singular and absolutely unique in the field of our experience. On a single planet, there could not be more than one centre of emergence for reflexion.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

Had I been a great athlete, I’m not sure I would have even gone into coaching. I may have turned out feeling that my life ended when my athletic career ended, as happens so many times with various athletes.

I used to let other people’s struggles affect my happiness. If they weren’t happy, there was no way I was going to be happy. The opposite was also true: If I wasn’t happy, I didn’t want anyone around me to be happy.

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?

Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don’t know that I’m doing it, usually.

I was ill, and everyone could see it but me.

I exaggerate when I’m angry, but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.

I’ve never bought into any sort of hard and fast, this-box/that-box characterization. People are individuals. Yes, they may be expected to be a particular way. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be that way.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

Mastery passes often for egotism.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

There are hunters, and there are victims. By your discipline, cunning, obedience, and alertness, you will decide if you are a hunter or a victim.

I guess every single word I’ve ever said is going to be dissected now.

I say what I want to say and do what I want to do. There’s no in between. People will either love you for it or hate you for it.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.

Even if you’re happy with the life you’ve chosen, you’re still curious about the other options.

You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment.

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all.

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

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.

We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.

We think too much and feel too little.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

People just overshoot trying to find God. They’re going outside and trying everything. They don’t realize that it’s right inside themselves.

I think what’s important is for us to decipher what is honest and what is dishonest and be accepting of those things and not operating from fear.

Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

Of course, when I say that human nature is gentleness, it is not 100 percent so. Every human being has that nature, but there are many people acting against their nature, being false.