My weak spot is laziness. Oh, I have a lot of weak spots: cookies, croissants.

I know my flaws before other people point them out to me.

He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.

You know, my family and friends have never been yes-men: ‚Yes, you’re doing the right thing, you’re always right.‘ No, they tell me when I’m wrong, and that’s why I’ve been able to stay who I am and stay humble.

As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I’ve got left?

Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

The truth is that you can only come to know God when you give up the past and the future in your mind and merge totally into the now, because God is always here now.

If you are against yourself, you will never reach your highest potential. And when you criticize yourself, you’re criticizing God.

A daily portion is really all we need. We do not need tomorrow’s supply, for that day has not yet dawned, and its needs are still unborn.

There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.

Now that I understand that I’m an addict, I definitely have compassion for my mother. I get it.

I thank God I’m in a position where I can pick and choose – there are some roles I don’t play.

Self-talk, for me, has been the biggest thing in my life. A lot of us have a dialogue that is crap. It’s a crappy dialogue. We live in a world right now that is very external. Everything is very on the surface. Superficial. Everything. And what we’re telling ourselves is what we see on TV.

When people are lame, they love to blame.

I look like a casual, laid-back guy, but it’s like a circus in my head.

Hatred is self-punishment.

I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity.

It’s tough to negotiate from a position of weakness.

I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.

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.

We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Don’t ever criticize yourself. Don’t go around all day long thinking, ‚I’m unattractive, I’m slow, I’m not as smart as my brother.‘ God wasn’t having a bad day when he made you… If you don’t love yourself in the right way, you can’t love your neighbour. You can’t be as good as you are supposed to be.

I’m not happy all the time, and I wouldn’t want to be because that would make me a shallow person. But I do try to find the good in everybody.

Imaginary evils soon become real one by indulging our reflections on them.

The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.

I just really believe people have to get hungry. I think maybe what we need to do, instead of trying to stuff our beliefs down people’s throats, is just pray for them to really be hungry and to see their neediness.

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.

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

We’re so trendy we can’t even escape ourselves.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

Silence is a source of great strength.

Thoughts are fine when you don’t confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.

Observe all men, thyself most.

Really, who you are is defined by the people who you know – not even the people that you know, but the people you spend time with and the people that you love and the people that you work with. I guess we show your friends in your profile, but that’s kind of different from the information you put in your profile.

When you realize who you live for, and who’s important to please, a lot of people will actually start living. I am never going to get caught up in that. I’m gonna look back on my life and say that I enjoyed it – and I lived it for me.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

I’m super self-critical, which I think is good, because then I get exactly what I want. I’m critical of other people, too – I try not to be, though.

I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulty of my life… I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a vagabond.

Vanity is but the surface.

The fact that you are willing to say, ‚I do not understand, and it is fine,‘ is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.

I guess I’m living in the present more than the past.

I’m happy being myself, which I’ve never been before. I always hid in other people, or tried to find myself through the characters, or live out their lives, but I didn’t have those things in mine.

Sure, I can get a little bit jealous. The good part about jealousy is that it comes from passion. It’s also the dangerous part and it’s an ugly emotion that hurts.

The one thing that I keep learning over and over again is that I don’t know nothing. I mean, that’s my life lesson.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

I’ve never been an intellectual but I have this look.

None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.

We choose what attitudes we have right now. And it’s a continuing choice.

I’m trying to keep a level head. You have to be careful out in the world. It’s so easy to get turned.

People often speak of God being even-handed. God is not even-handed. God is biased, in favor of the weak, of the despised.

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.

The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.

Narrow your life down to this moment. Your life situation may be full of problems – most life situations are – but find out if you have a problem at this moment. Do you have a problem now?

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

Eventually you get to this point where you understand what you want to do and get across and sound like.

In the West, as well as some other parts of the world, the personal sense of ego tends to predominate, whereas in other areas, there is a more collective sense of ego. This collective ego emphasizes the ‚we‘ rather than the ‚I.‘

You have a nice personality, but not for a human being.

Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.

I have great respect for the past. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going. I have respect for the past, but I’m a person of the moment. I’m here, and I do my best to be completely centered at the place I’m at, then I go forward to the next place.