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

It is possible to live happily in the here and the now. So many conditions of happiness are available – more than enough for you to be happy right now. You don’t have to run into the future in order to get more.

Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

I try to speak plainly so that my constituents who don’t follow the nuances of government like I do, because they’re too busy earning a real living, can understand the issues before me. None of this stuff is brain surgery.

When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live.

I don’t have to chase extraordinary moments to find happiness – it’s right in front of me if I’m paying attention and practicing gratitude.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

North Americans don’t understand… that our country is not just Cuba; our country is also humanity.

Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

Never find fault with the absent.

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

We see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.

We’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.

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

If I forget to pray, I can’t get through the day without snapping at people.

Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

The deferring of anger is the best antidote to anger.

I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden, and I go, ‚Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.‘

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.

At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn’t think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn’t be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So I didn’t understand how that added up.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.

For many people who are so lost in their minds, so much involved in their thought processes, the only moments they have when they are not trapped in that is when they are relating to their animal, their pet.

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.

I have to be in tune. All the time. I have to be in tune with my husband, where he is, how he’s feeling. I have to be in tune with where my family is.

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.

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

Commonsense is the realised sense of proportion.

You always have to remember that if you say something negative, it’s going to come back to haunt you.

I’m an expert typist. I learned in high school. I would close my eyes and just type without worrying about mistakes. I tried to penetrate my heart, and as I let my thoughts drift, things bubbled up to the surface.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

If you want what you’re saying heard, then take your time and say it so that the listener will actually hear it. You might save somebody’s life. Your own, first.

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

Give yourself a gift of five minutes of contemplation in awe of everything you see around you. Go outside and turn your attention to the many miracles around you. This five-minute-a-day regimen of appreciation and gratitude will help you to focus your life in awe.

Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences.

It’s the way I study – to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

It’s very important that we re-learn the art of resting and relaxing. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.

Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

The fewer the words, the better the prayer.

I’m just hoping that people understand that Islam is peace and not violence.

Meditation is a state of mind which looks at everything with complete attention, totally, not just parts of it. And no one can teach you how to be attentive. If any system teaches you how to be attentive, then you are attentive to the system, and that is not attention.

I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.

Remind yourself that the greatest technique for bringing peace into your life is to always choose being kind when you have a choice between being right or being kind.

The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.

Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don’t believe is right.

I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.