Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.

When you smoke the herb, it reveals you to yourself.

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.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

You’re not going to say anything about me that I’m not going to say about myself. There’s so many things that I think about myself; if someone really wanted to get at me, they could say this and this and this. So I’m going to say it before they can. It’s the best policy for me.

In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.

Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.

One who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

No one is laughable who laughs at himself.

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.

No man ever prayed heartily without learning something.

The ‚soul‘ is one of the words you can use to talk about your innermost being, the essence of who you are.

We are always doing something for posterity, but I would fain see posterity do something for us.

I never desired to please the rabble. What pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far removed from their understanding.

It’s easy to forget who you are.

To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.

I felt I had to solve everyone’s problems.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

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.

Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

I’m no leader; I’m a little humble follower.

I’m living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

I’m quite a chauvinistic person.

I hate pain, despite my ability to tolerate it beyond all known parameters, which is not necessarily a good thing.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

No, I’m not a French designer either. I’m from nowhere. I’m a European, old European is all I am.

Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?

Before you start a goal – let’s take care of our insecurities because they are going to surface when you put yourself in the crucible and you’re suffering.

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately… you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you.

If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.

Every once in a while, you let a word or phrase out and you want to catch it and bring it back. You can’t do that. It’s gone, gone forever.

For most of us, wisdom is acquired in the thicket of experience and usually meets us somewhere along the way if we live long enough. But sooner is better than later.

Changing is not just changing the things outside of us. First of all we need the right view that transcends all notions including of being and non-being, creator and creature, mind and spirit. That kind of insight is crucial for transformation and healing.

He who knows himself is enlightened.

The real power of the Buddha was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their notions of small separate self, feeling guilty or proud of that self, and he offered revolutionary teachings that resounded like a lion’s roar, like a great rising tide, helping people to wake up and break free from the prison of ignorance.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

If every choice you make comes from an honest place, you’re solid, and nothing anybody can say about you can rock you or change your opinion.

Your emotions are very unstable and should never be the foundation for direction in your life.

Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

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

Time is the only critic without ambition.

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.

When we tell the story of our own conversion, I would have it done with great sorrow, remembering what we used to be, and with great joy and gratitude, remembering how little we deserve these things.

The Hindu religions gave me the impression of a vast well into which one plunges in order to grasp the reflection of the sun.

Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.

We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.

You say that you are my judge; I do not know if you are; but take good heed not to judge me ill, because you would put yourself in great peril.

Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life, and… the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

In order to heal others, we first need to heal ourselves. And to heal ourselves, we need to know how to deal with ourselves.

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.