The only thing you ever have is now.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

Pay attention, don’t let life go by you. Fall in love with the back of your cereal box.

Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences.

You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might also pray in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.

A mind at peace, a mind centered and not focused on harming others, is stronger than any physical force in the universe.

It makes no sense to worry about things you have no control over because there’s nothing you can do about them, and why worry about things you do control? The activity of worrying keeps you immobilized.

Little things affect little minds.

A great hallmark of mental wellness is the ability to be in the present moment, fully and with no thoughts of being elsewhere.

Give yourself a gift of five minutes of contemplation in awe of everything you see around you. Go outside and turn your attention to the many miracles around you. This five-minute-a-day regimen of appreciation and gratitude will help you to focus your life in awe.

Meditation demands an astonishingly alert mind; it is the understanding of the totality of life in which every form of fragmentation has ceased.

Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life.

My head’s never really quiet. The only time I can get it to turn off is if I watch ‚CSI‘ or ‚Law & Order,‘ where I have to follow the crime. If I can’t turn my head off during that, I know I’ve really got a problem.

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 don’t try to control my days.

Sometimes I catch myself stooping, and whenever I am like that, I am sure something is not quite right.

When it comes to everybody else’s thing and their lane and their timing, I’m never doing anything intentional to, like, come after somebody. That will always be my biggest mistake or anybody’s biggest mistake if that’s their intention.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

Don’t wait to be successful at some future point. Have a successful relationship with the present moment and be fully present in whatever you are doing. That is success.

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.

Never take anything for granted.

When we go out to the country and just sit there, what we’re really doing is just switching off various kinds of alertness that we don’t have to use. When we do that, we are stopping being defensive. We are no longer shutting ourselves off from different types of experiences, we are welcoming them in.

Peace in the world starts with peace in oneself. If everyone lives mindfully, everyone will be more healthy, feel more fulfilled in their daily lives and there will be more peace.

Be of love a little more careful than of anything.

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

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

If you aren’t in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret.

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster.

Things done well and with a care, exempt themselves from fear.

Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes.

The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears.

The problem with meditating is I generally go to sleep, and that’s because I’m doing it wrong.

True self is non-self, the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements. There’s no separation between self and other, and everything is interconnected. Once you are aware of that you are no longer caught in the idea that you are a separate entity.

People don’t realize that now is all there ever is; there is no past or future except as memory or anticipation in your mind.

Your Highest Self is not just an idea that sounds lofty and spiritual. It is a way of being. It is the very first principle that you must come to understand and embrace as you move toward attracting to you that which you want and need for this parenthesis in eternity that you know as your life.

Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.

I’m not a regrets-type person.

Become slower in your journey through life. Practice yoga and meditation if you suffer from ‚hurry sickness.‘ Become more introspective by visiting quiet places such as churches, museums, mountains and lakes. Give yourself permission to read at least one novel a month for pleasure.

There is so much that people take for granted.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

Peace begins with a smile.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

I think the most important thing is to keep active and to hope that your mind stays active.

Control thy passions lest they take vengence on thee.

In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.

I don’t carry the burden of the past or the madness of the future. I live in the present.

Always have something beautiful in sight, even if it’s just a daisy in a jelly glass.

It is possible to live happily in the here and the now. So many conditions of happiness are available – more than enough for you to be happy right now. You don’t have to run into the future in order to get more.

To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.

Compassionate listening is to help the other side suffer less. If we realize that other people are the same people as we are, we are no longer angry at them.

True self is non-self, the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements. There’s no separation between self and other, and everything is interconnected.

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.

Every day I try to be in communication with the universe in an unconscious way.

In Buddhism, we talk of meditation as an act of awakening, to be awake to the fact that the earth is in danger and living species are in danger.

I believe that a simple and unassuming manner of life is best for everyone, best both for the body and the mind.

We will be more successful in all our endeavors if we can let go of the habit of running all the time, and take little pauses to relax and re-center ourselves. And we’ll also have a lot more joy in living.

Cultivation to the mind is as necessary as food to the body.

Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.

Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you.