“You have to strive every minute to get rid of the life that you have planned in order to have the life that’s waiting to be yours. Move, move, move.”

Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.

The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact.

How do you find the divine power in yourself? The word enthusiasm means ‘filled with a god,’ so what makes you enthusiastic? Follow it. So I have a little word: follow your bliss. The bliss is the message of God to yourself. That’s where your life is.

The Fates guide those who will and drag those who won’t!

Find a place inside where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.

Let the world be as it is and learn to rock with the waves.

The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion.

Vegetarians are people who cannot hear tomatos screaming.

Change the focus of the eye. When you have done that, then the end of the world as you formerly knew it will have occurred, and you will experience the radiance of the divine presence everywhere, here and now.

Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and its spectacular.

You’ve got to say yes to this miracle of life as it is, not on condition that it follow your rules.

The problem of making the inner meet the outer of today is, of course, the function of the artist.

If you follow your bliss…the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.

You don’t ask what a dance means. You enjoy it. You don’t ask what the world means. You enjoy it. You don’t ask what you mean. You enjoy it.

When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We’re not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.

It is not society which is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse.

The life of a nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.

That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence.

The more we try to live in the world of words, the more we feel isolated and alone, the more all the joy and liveliness of things is exchanged for mere certainty and security.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

Reading has changed the course of my life radically. I did not aim behind it to gain any certificates to improve my position. Rather, I wanted to live intellectually.

Life is busy. There are daily concerns and obligations that have to be met, and to take time to think about how precious and special a human life is that you only get one, and that every wasted minute is lost. You can’t get it back.

Maybe my fairy tale has a different ending than I dreamed it would. But that’s OK.

I love life. But it is hard and I have so much, so very much to learn.