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.

Don’t talk about what you have done or what you are going to do.

I have all the emotions that everyone has; it just appears that I don’t.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future.

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

If you’re in business or politics, you need to have an intense understanding of what’s going on around you.

One thing about me is I try to be honest.

The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.

The situation the Earth is in today has been created by unmindful production and unmindful consumption. We consume to forget our worries and our anxieties. Tranquilising ourselves with over-consumption is not the way.

I know black people love the idea that we finally have a beautiful, good-looking black president. But if he is doing awful things to us, we should wake up.

I was ashamed to admit I was hipped to the idea of acting. That’s why I started in with the props.

I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.

I feel you’re in charge of your own situation.

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

Many people have an intense feeling about what they’re best at. Too often, they’re driven away from it by other people.

At some point, you grow out of being attracted to that flame that burns you over and over and over again.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realised that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down.

I don’t think about the end game. I’ve got lots to occupy my mind. It’s the rage that keeps me going.

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.

You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when its waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye.

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.

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

Whatever one of us blames in another, each one will find in his own heart.

I think it’s horrible that people have to be told. Don’t smoke! Everybody knows it’s bad for the health. But they have to forbid it.

The single most powerful thing I can be is to be myself.

Worry is the interest paid by those who borrow trouble.

Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.

If you’re not careful to think and speak words of faith, worry will creep in, and it will not only steal your peace and joy, it will steal your ‚today.‘ The present is the greatest gift God ever gives us. So hold on to the peace that’s yours in Christ. Don’t let it go.

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

When you practice gratefulness, there is a sense of respect toward others.

Let each know that for each the body, the mind and the soul have been freed to fulfill themselves.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

When you wash your hands, when you make a cup of coffee, when you’re waiting for the elevator – instead of indulging in thinking, these are all opportunities for being there as a still, alert presence.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

We’re all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self.

Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.

I’m really trying to dredge up what one might call intellectual and moral material. For example, when do you realize that you are an American? What age does that happen to you? When do you realize what religion your parents practice? When does it all become conscious? I was interested in exploring all of that.

I’m inconsistent, even to myself.

With music, you often don’t have to translate it. It just affects you, and you don’t know why.

When you’re not engaged in the day-to-day struggles that everybody feels, you slowly start losing touch. And I think it’s important for the people in the White House to have a finger on the pulse.

If it’s stress of things that we cannot control, what you have to do is you mitigate that stress as much as possible. You’ve planned, you’ve trained, you’ve done everything you can in your power to mitigate the stress that’s facing you. And then after that, there’s nothing you can do. So, you have to let that one go.

I’ve noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it’s far enough in the future.

I think that I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.

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.

Deep down, I know I have this intuition or instinct that a lot of creative people have, that their demons are also what make them create.

Everyone assumes I practise all of my own laws but I don’t. I think anybody who did would be a horrible ugly person to be around.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

I carry a small sheet of paper in my wallet that has written on it the names of people whose opinions of me matter. To be on that list, you have to love me for my strengths and struggles.

When thou art above measure angry, bethink thee how momentary is man’s life.

Execute every act of thy life as though it were thy last.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.