The funny thing is, all my friends are short. I wasn’t aware of tall people till I got to high school. I didn’t know they existed. I was sheltered.

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so that I can ‚solve the climate crisis.‘ But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

All of my friends who have younger siblings who are going to college or high school – my number one piece of advice is: You should learn how to program.

It’s a well-known fact that tall people are evil.

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.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.

Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it’s how you deal with your life, with your surroundings.

The fight against AIDS in China is already well underway. The Chinese government and other funders are providing major support, and they’ll continue to bear primary responsibility for delivering prevention and treatment.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

Let’s face it. No kid in high school feels as though they fit in.

I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear. That is our duty.

My first big mission for UNICEF in Ethiopia was just to attract attention, before it was too late, to conditions which threatened the whole country. My role was to inform the world, to make sure that the people of Ethiopia were not forgotten.

When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn’t know it had a name.

Words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

I found that with depression, one of the most important things you could realise is that you’re not alone.

It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.

But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.

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

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what’s happening in Africa, and if we’re honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

Each doctor makes a much, much more important job than I do, but at the end, nobody talks about him. We all know about it, but we don’t really think about it.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.

When you read, I’m sure you don’t realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don’t do that.

I am not stupid. I am a very bright guy. I know that in the fighting game, you get people who get brain damage and do themselves long-term harm.

Akron, Ohio, is my home. I will always be here. I’m still working out at my old high school.

In high school, I majored in brick masonry. We had the wood shop, the machine shop, so I know about all that. I wanted to build buildings when I graduated from high school. I do know my way around that stuff.

Our present moment is a mystery that we are part of. Here and now is where all the wonder of life lies hidden. And make no mistake about it, to strive to live completely in the present is to strive for what already is the case.

Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby?

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

We’re in very bad trouble if we don’t understand the planet we’re trying to save.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.

I believe that Catholics involved in politics carry the values of their religion within them, but have the mature awareness and expertise to implement them. The Church will never go beyond its task of expressing and disseminating its values, at least as long as I’m here.

Every time I hear a politician mention the word ‚stimulus,‘ my mind flashes back to high school biology class, when I touched battery wires to a dead frog to make it twitch.

I think about the milestones from my childhood and what it will be like to watch our kids go through them. Taking Riley to her first day of school was a whirlwind. I can’t imagine what middle school is going to be like, and high school, and graduation.

Many people are alive but don’t touch the miracle of being alive.

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.

What most people know but don’t realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn’t there, we’d be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.

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

I think that we have opportunities all around us – sometimes we just don’t recognize them.

When the mind is empty, silent, when it is in a state of complete negation – which is not blankness, nor the opposite of being positive, but a totally different state in which all thought has ceased – only then is it possible for that which is unnameable to come into being.

I think feminists are unaware of the tremendous extent of the role of women in history.

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.

I have been aware all the time that my peoples, spread far and wide throughout every continent and ocean in the world, were united to support me in the task to which I have now been dedicated with such solemnity.

Our global economy is much more fragile than many of us realize.

Emotions are continually affecting our thought processes and decisions, below the level of our awareness. And the most common emotion of them all is the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

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

I remember when I was in high school I didn’t have a new dress for each special occasion. The girls would bring the fact to my attention, not always too delicately. The boys, however, never bothered with the subject. They were my friends, not because of the size of my wardrobe but because they liked me.

You know, people talk about this being an uncertain time. You know, all time is uncertain. I mean, it was uncertain back in – in 2007, we just didn’t know it was uncertain. It was – uncertain on September 10th, 2001. It was uncertain on October 18th, 1987, you just didn’t know it.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

AIDS itself is subject to incredible stigma.

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 answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it’s beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.