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

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.

The greatest obstacle to connecting with our joy is resentment.

If you follow your heart, you’re going to find that it is often extremely inconvenient.

It isn’t what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it’s what we say to ourselves about what happens.

As our kindness for ourselves grows, so does our kindness for other people.

If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.

The only certainty is death.

I know that they want certain things and they’re in a certain room and they smell like this and they look like that.

At a certain point you have to make a decision in your life about where will you best serve

I get why certain actors want to stay in the closet.

I was looking for something and I wasn’t sure what it was. [After experimenting with] certain funguses,

It is a good thing to proceed in order and to establish propositions. This is the way to gain ground and to progress with certainty.

There’s a certain amount of mind control that happens. Everybody is living in a world where they’re being controlled.

There’s a certain level of pageantry with ‘Idol,’ and in order to work the show, you kind of have to feed into it.