“Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.”

Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.

The source of all light is in the eye.

A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated.

You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.

What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.

We confuse money with actual wealth.

If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.

The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double.

Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

Belief clings, but faith lets go.