“Never give up on yourself. Then you will never give up on others.”

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.

The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

Since death is certain and the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?

The greatest obstacle to connecting with our joy is resentment.

Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

Our first duty is not to hate ourselves, because to advance we must have faith in ourselves first and then in God. Those who have no faith in themselves can never have faith in God.

Being an entrepreneur is simply going from one mistake to the next. You must have the fortitude to continue on.

The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.

When I started my last business, I didn’t receive a paycheck for 13 months. The average person can’t handle that pressure.

If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.

The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.