“What is truly a part of our spiritual path is that which brings us alive. If gardening brings us alive, that is part of our path, if it is music, if it is conversation we must follow what brings us alive.”

Train your mind the same way you’d train a puppy: Be patient, be consistent, and have some fun along the way.

Attention to the human body brings healing and regeneration. Through awareness of the body we remember who we really are.

Peace requires us to surrender our illusions of control.

Even Socrates, who lived a very frugal and simple life, loved to go to the market. When his students asked about this, he replied, “I love to go and see all the things I am happy without.

We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.

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.

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.

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?

We have to reconceptualize and understand that the act of pursuing our dreams and being our full selves is what allows us to feel alive.

Charity is the soul of faith, makes it alive; without love, faith dies.

Whatever you are doing, that which makes you feel the most alive…that is where God is.

No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a strange, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

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.

I want to make people feel intensely alive. I’d rather have them against me than indifferent.

Isn’t it wonderful to be alive? You know, you can forget all about it. Then suddenly you remember, and think of all the things you can do. Here I am. I can walk around. I can talk. I can see things and remember things. I am alive. How wonderful!

I stay cool, and dig all jive, That’s the way I stay alive. My motto, as I live and learn, is Dig and be dug In return.