Meditation demands an astonishingly alert mind; it is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased.

Listen, I think that people want a president who is going to be interested in the things that keep them up at night, the things that are weighing on them, the things that are debilitating and can be addressed.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

Love has reasons which reason cannot understand.

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

Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.

For a tear is quickly dried, especially when shed for the misfortunes of others.

I’m not claiming divinity. I’ve never claimed purity of soul. I’ve never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can… But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.

Prejudice of any kind implies that you are identified with the thinking mind. It means you don’t see the other human being anymore, but only your own concept of that human being. To reduce the aliveness of another human being to a concept is already a form of violence.

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

Die to everything of yesterday so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigor and passion.

You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might also pray in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.

You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

The capability of negotiating… is something that means you not only have to understand fully what you believe and what your national interests are but in order to be a really good negotiator, you have to try to figure out what the other person on the other side of the table has in mind.

Many people are alive but don’t touch the miracle of being alive.

I spent years studying the teachings of Patanjali, and he reminded us several thousand years ago that when we are steadfast – which means that we never slip in our abstention of thoughts of harm directed toward others – then all living creatures cease to feel enmity in our presence.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

I restore myself when I’m alone.

Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.

Peace in the world starts with peace in oneself. If everyone lives mindfully, everyone will be more healthy, feel more fulfilled in their daily lives and there will be more peace.

A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything.

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.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation. Meditation is not concentration.

Peace begins with a smile.

Every day is a gift from God. Learn to focus on the Giver and enjoy the gift!

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

Much learning does not teach understanding.

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.

Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.

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.

Everything you need you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personal reality.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.

There is something in the way that we are now, with our cell phones, and people are not looking at each other and not being in the moment with each other, that kids feel isolated.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.

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

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

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

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

Most people treat the present moment as if it were an obstacle that they need to overcome. Since the present moment is life itself, it is an insane way to live.

Don’t just let the devil use your mind as a garbage dump.

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.

Do the best you can, and don’t take life too serious.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Religion and ritual can be vehicles for entering stillness. It says in Psalm 46:10, ‚Be still, and know that I am God.‘ But they are still just vehicles. The Buddha called his teaching a raft: You don’t need to carry it around with you after you’ve crossed the river.

True prayer is neither a mere mental exercise nor a vocal performance. It is far deeper than that – it is spiritual transaction with the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

The time when most of you should withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection – you cannot cope with the future.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.

I don’t try to control my days.

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

A person hears only what they understand.

It’s normal for human beings to identify with their own separate self. The problem is that we get caught in that notion of ourself as a separate individual and caught in that individual self’s agenda.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.