“One of your biggest lessons so far in life has been to learn to forgive myself over and over again and not to be so harsh with myself.”

Don’t give up on your dreams. You can become the person you know you really are.

Bliss is easy, just take a drug. What is hard is feeling good about our real selves.

Even if somebody tells us something, the hit, the light goes on inside of us, not out there. We learn and understand everything within ourselves.

I chant to save my heart. Every time I sit down, that’s what I’m doing.

Let’s just chant and be good people, alright?

We are not separate. So if one being hurts, I also hurt.

Ultimately when I am with you all, what I see is my Guru. And what is he? He is love.

To love somebody is to let them be who they are and do what they have to do.

Compassion is a college education. It’s a doctorate.

The repetition of the holy names reveals a presence hidden within the heart. Something begins to happen that’s very disturbing – we get happy.

The only real protection will come from doing a spiritual practice over a prolonged period of time. Because it retrains us to see the world and ourselves in a different way.

It’s within your world that things will unfold and intuitive understandings will open up.

Bhakti yoga isn’t something you join, it’s love. It means falling in love.

Chanting is a way of getting in touch with yourself. It’s an opening of the heart and letting go of the mind and thoughts. It deepens the channel of grace, and it’s a way of being present in the moment.

There is love in this world, and it lives within us as who we really are, not who we think we are.

Devotion is a way of being, it’s not something you do. It’s dedication to finding awareness and Love. Chanting is like asanas for the mind and the heart.

All discourses but my own afflict me; they seem harsh, impertinent, and irksome

The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.

Courage that comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one’s actions, courage that could be described as ‘grace under pressure’ – grace which is renewed repeatedly in the face of harsh, unremitting pressure.

As you pass from the tender years of youth into harsh and embittered manhood, make sure you take with you on your journey all the human emotions! Don’t leave them on the road, for you will not pick them up afterwards!

It is too great comfort which turns a man against himself. Life is most readily renounced at the time and among the classes where it is least harsh.

Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.

For humans, the Arctic is a harshly inhospitable place, but the conditions there are precisely what polar bears require to survive – and thrive. ‘Harsh’ to us is ‘home’ for them.

Arrogance is a mixture of impertinence, disobedience, indiscipline, rudeness, harshness, and a self-assertive nature.