“For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.”

People become concerned with being more humble than other people.

The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.

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.

Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.

A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.

Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.

We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.

Human desire tends to be insatiable.

I owe my solitude to other people.

When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us.

We know that from time to time, there arise among human beings, people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

We must be neither cowardly nor rash but courageous.

Accomplishing something provides the only real satisfaction in life.

Three rules: I do not eat too much; I do not worry too much; and, if I do my best, I believe that what happens, happens for the best.

When writing the story of your life, don’t let anyone else hold the pen.

Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life.

Don’t worry about a thing, every little thing is gonna be alright.

Our mere anticipations of life outrun its realities.

No one loses any other life than the one he now lives, nor does one live any other life than that which he will lose.