“Don’t surround yourself with people who just affirm you. Surround yourself with people who challenge you.”

The truth is that we can learn to condition our minds, bodies, and emotions to link pain or pleasure to whatever we choose. By changing what we link pain and pleasure to, we will instantly change our behaviors.

Life is found in the dance between your deepest desire and your greatest fear.

In life you need either inspiration or desperation.

Passion is the genesis of genius.

Trade your expectations for appreciation and the world changes for you.

If you talk about it, it’s a dream, if you envision it, it’s possible, but if you schedule it, it’s real.

Life, never deciding to master anything in particular.

Investing in the science of food is truly an investment in our future.

People who fail focus on what they have to go through; people who succeed focus on what it will feel like at the end.

Identify your problems, but give your power and energy to solutions.

Ten years from now you’ll laugh at whatever’s stressing you out today. So why not laugh now?

The meeting of preparation with opportunity generates the offspring we call luck.

It’s our unlimited power to create and love in any circumstance that makes the biggest difference in the quality of our lives.

We can get better results with ourselves and others by asking better questions.

It is your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny.

Live life fully while you’re here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird.

My purpose here is to affirm that the unitive state is a hidden path in itself, a movement in its own right that ultimately leads to no-self (no true-self and no-union). In short, the unitive state is the hidden path to no-self.

Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it.

I love black because it affirms, designs and styles. A woman in a black dress is a pencil stroke.

It is saying less than the truth to affirm that an excellent book (and the remark holds almost equally good of a Raphael as of a Milton) is like a well-chosen and well-tended fruit tree. Its fruits are not of one season only. With the due and natural intervals.

We affirm that the true story of capitalism is now beginning, because capitalism is not a system of oppression only, but is also a selection of values, a coordination of hierarchies, a more amply developed sense of individual responsibility.

Christianity affirms the value of each individual soul. Nazism denies it.

But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understand, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses.

Rarely affirm, seldom deny, always distinguish.