“We must be willing to encounter darkness and despair when they come up and face them, over and over again if need be, without running away or numbing ourselves in the thousands of ways we conjure up to avoid the unavoidable.”

Voluntary simplicity means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more.

The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment to moment.

Living in a chronic state of unawareness can cause us to miss much of what is most beautiful and meaningful in our lives.

Healing is a coming to terms with things as they are, rather than struggling to force them to be as they once were, or as we would like them to be, to feel secure or to have what we sometimes think of as our own way.

Patience is a form of wisdom. It demonstrates that we understand and accept the fact that sometimes things must unfold in their own time.

When you pay attention to boredom it gets unbelievably interesting.

Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.

Mindfulness is not about getting anywhere else.

Mindful parenting is the hardest job on the planet, but it’s also one that has the potential for the deepest kinds of satisfactions over the life span, and the greatest feelings of interconnectedness and community and belonging.

Mindfulness is a way of paying attention, on purpose and non-judgmentally, to what goes on in the present moment in your body, mind and the world around you.

See for yourself whether letting go when a part of you really wants to hold on doesn’t bring a deeper satisfaction than clinging.

Paying attention and awareness are universal capacities of human beings.

Meditation is really a non-doing. It is the only human endeavor I know of being where you already are.

When you’re walking, just walk. When you’re eating, just eat. Not in front of the TV, not with the newspaper. It turns out, that’s huge.

The only time that any of us have to grow or change or feel or learn anything is in the present moment. But we’re continually missing our present moments, almost willfully, by not paying attention.

Dying without actually fully living, without waking up to our lives while we have the chance, is an ongoing and significant risk.

In the beginning we must simplify the subject, thus unavoidably falsifying it, and later we must sophisticate away the falsely simple beginning.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

The heart will welcome destruction to avoid tasting loneliness -why we stay.

The art of crisis management is to raise the stakes to where the adversary will not follow, but in a manner that avoids a tit for tat.

If changes are unavoidable, nothing is permanent. If nothing is permanent, everything is temporary.

If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots.

We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided.

If the art of war were nothing but the art of avoiding risks, glory would become the prey of mediocre minds, I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest.