Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

Acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, a subtle energy vibration, is consciousness.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

Suppose you could gain everything in the whole world, and lost your soul. Was it worth it?

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

He who can be, and therefore is, another’s, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

That’s the biggest gift I can give anybody: ‚Wake up, be aware of who you are, what you’re doing and what you can do to prevent yourself from becoming ill.‘

It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

I think all Americans believe in human rights. And health is an often overlooked aspect of basic human rights. And it’s one that’s easily corrected. The reason I say that is that many of the diseases that we treat around the world, I knew when I was a child. My mother was a registered nurse. And they no longer exist in our country.

By indignities men come to dignities.

Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength.

I believe in the Golden Rule – The Man with the Gold… Rules.

Breathe in deeply to bring your mind home to your body. Then look at, or think of, the person triggering this emotion: With mindfulness, you can see that she is unhappy, that she is suffering. You can see her wrong perceptions. You can see that she is not beautiful when she says things that are unkind.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

Religions get lost as people do.

I’m not a New Age person, but I do believe in meditation, and for that reason I’ve always liked the Buddhist religion. When I’ve been to Japan, I’ve been to Buddhist temples and meditated, and I found that rewarding.

This is the first age that’s ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

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

Stop acting as if life is a rehearsal. Live this day as if it were your last. The past is over and gone. The future is not guaranteed.

When you look at the sun during your walking meditation, the mindfulness of the body helps you to see that the sun is in you; without the sun there is no life at all and suddenly you get in touch with the sun in a different way.

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

Pick the day. Enjoy it – to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come… The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present – and I don’t want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

To realize that you are not your thoughts is when you begin to awaken spiritually.

To be a monk is to have time to practice for your transformation and healing. And after that to help with the transformation and healing of other people.

Every blessing ignored becomes a curse.

I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

Whatever you dwell on in the conscious grows in your experience.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that there are people who can’t or won’t see what Black Lives Matter is trying to accomplish.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.

The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.

If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you’re just one more deluded Pollyanna.

Silence is the mother of truth.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.