What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.

To me the ego is the habitual and compulsive thought processes that go through everybody’s mind continuously. External things like possessions or memories or failures or successes or achievements. Your personal history.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear – kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor – with the cry of grave national emergency.

Hatred is inveterate anger.

Meditation can help us embrace our worries, our fear, our anger; and that is very healing. We let our own natural capacity of healing do the work.

When we value correct principles, we have truth – a knowledge of things as they are.

Men and women do think differently, and frankly, we don’t understand each other. Not at all! But that’s what makes relationships so amazing.

We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

It’s in the best interest of the radical left types – best psychological and strategic interest – to refuse to admit to the possibility that reasonable people can object to their ideological staff. Because if reasonable people objected, that would imply that their ideological stance is not reasonable.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.

I’m pretty calculating. I take stuff that I know appeals to people’s bad sides and match it up with stuff that appeals to their good sides.

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.

Listen with the intent to understand, not the intent to reply.

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.

I am able to play monsters well. I understand monsters. I understand madmen.

Commonsense is the realised sense of proportion.

I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first.

Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand.

I believe it is universally understood and acknowledged that all men will ever act correctly, unless they have a motive to do otherwise.

I don’t want to wake up and be bored. That’s probably my greatest fear is to have nothing to do. What better job is there than to play quarterback for an NFL team, and certainly one that I’ve been on for a long time and had success with? I don’t plan on giving it up any time soon.

There’s nothing funnier than the human animal.

I’m addicted to placebos.

All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.

Paranoia is just another word for ignorance.

People respond in accordance to how you relate to them. If you approach them on the basis of violence, that’s how they’ll react. But if you say, ‚We want peace, we want stability,‘ we can then do a lot of things that will contribute towards the progress of our society.

The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way.

People have different emotional levels. Especially when you’re young.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

I have this feeling that the world is not in balance. And people are afraid, but we’re also starting to be really brave.

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.

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

The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

I don’t think culture is something you can describe.

When you learn about the teaching and the practice of another tradition, you always have a chance to understand your own teaching and practice.

It is a wise father that knows his own child.

It’s presumptuous to say you know how somebody feels.

Where fear is, happiness is not.

Whether you like it or not, you’re forced to come to the realisation that death is out there. But I don’t fear death, I’m a fatalist. I believe when it’s your time, that’s it. It’s the hand you’re dealt.

My wife and I don’t compete. We know each other’s preferences, and we work to provide those for each other. One will take over when the other is faced with something he or she dislikes. That’s what friends do.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts… perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

I’m actually starting to like more and more people who have convictions that are unpopular.

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

Despair is a narcotic. It lulls the mind into indifference.

Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code – with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It’s very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.