“Every facet, every department of your mind, is to be programmed by you. And unless you assume your rightful responsibility, and begin to program your own mind, the world will program it for you.”

To let go does not mean to get rid of. To let go means to let be. When we let be with compassion, things come and go on their own.

Equanimity arises when we accept the way things are.

The person who betrayed you is sunning themselves on a beach in Hawaii and you’re knotted up in hatred. Who is suffering?

The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner’s mind.

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

The grief we carry is part of the grief of the world. Hold it gently. Let it be honored. You do not have to keep it in anymore. You can let go into the heart of compassion; you can weep.

We can always begin again.

Within each of us there is a silence as vast as the universe. We long for it. We can return to it.

We do not have to improve ourselves; we just have to let go of what blocks our heart.

Life is so hard, how can we be anything but kind?

To undertake a genuine spiritual path is not to avoid difficulties but to learn the art of making mistakes wakefully, to bring them to the transformative power of our heart.

Compassion for ourselves gives rise to the power to transform resentment into forgiveness, hatred into friendliness, and fear into respect for all beings.

When we let go of our battles and open our hearts to things as they are, then we come to rest in the present moment. This is the beginning and the end of spiritual practice.

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.

No matter how difficult the past, you can always begin again today.

A second quality of mature spirituality is kindness. It is based on a fundamental notion of self-acceptance.

All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won’t come in. If you challenge your own, you won’t be so quick to accept the unchallenged assumptions of others.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in.

Love can only consist in failure…on the fallacious assumption that it is a relationship. But it is not. It is a production of truth.

The assumption is that the people that are marching and protesting and standing up against this don’t have enough sense to stand up for their own interests.

The Democratic Party hasn’t whipped anybody into a frenzy.

an assumption that has resulted in the rapid expansion of the real estate securitization business.

You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions-things that you believe because you were taught or told they were true.