“Being satisfied with what we already have is a magical golden key to being alive in a full, unrestricted, and inspired way.”

Let your curiosity be greater than your fear.

You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.

Feeling irritated, restless, afraid, and hopeless is a reminder to listen more carefully.

Feel the feelings and drop the story.

The best spiritual instruction is when you wake up in the morning and say, ‘I wonder what’s going to happen today.’ And then carry that kind of curiosity through your life.

Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.

All situations teach you, and often it’s the tough ones that teach you best.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. Even if we run a hundred miles an hour to the other side of the continent, we find the very same problem awaiting us when we arrive.

Let difficulty transform you. And it will. In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away.

So war and peace start in the human heart. Whether that heart is open or whether that heart closes has global implications.

Anything we experience, no matter how challenging, can become an open pathway to awakening.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.

Whatever happens in your life, joyful or painful, do not be swept away by reactivity. Be patient with yourself and don’t lose your sense of perspective.

All the wars, all the hatred, all the ignorance in the world come out of being so invested in our opinions.

We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.

Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things.

All the dreams you planted in my eyes, will someday haunt you alive.

He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.

Bittersweet memories dancing in the pupils of my hollowed out eyes, these sugar-coated recollections attempt to latch onto me ultimately eating me alive.

Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

The fields have eyes, and the woods have ears.