“I can’t love you as you have been or will be. I can only love you as you are.”

The only thing you fear is the unreality that you yourself have invented.

When your mind opens, the whole world falls into place.

Reality doesn’t wait for your opinion, vote, or permission, sweetheart. It just keeps being what it is and doing what it does.

Realizing that people should lie when they do makes me a little more open-minded, a little more tolerant, when my child or my partner lies.

A thought is harmless unless we believe it.

In my experience, we don’t make thoughts appear, they just appear. One day, I noticed that their appearance just wasn’t personal. Noticing that really makes it simpler to inquire.

We say to others only what we need to hear.

I didn’t fight or shame my thoughts, I questioned them, and they stopped shaming me.

When a thought hurts, that’s the signal that it isn’t true.

That’s where the fear comes from-from your uninvestigated thoughts.

Until you can see everything in the world as your friend, your work is not done.

You can only see what you believe—nothing else is possible.

Don’t be careful. You could hurt yourself.

I believe in the power of every human being to end suffering.

Everything that happens is God’s will. When you realize that, you’re home free.

We do not mature through age. We mature in awareness.

You have to let individuals make their own choices and respect that, even if it’s your own child. And that’s what was taken away from me. My father passed away thinking I still had to go back to his way of believing.

Nothing will come of forcing yourself to compete your way out of trauma.

The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people.

A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

When I’m willing to let them change me, something happens between us that’s more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues.

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

Working on The West Wing was similar in many ways to my experience on M*A*S*H, because you had people willing to work late at night to get it just right.

The worst story I know is my heart. The best story I know is my heart. Both these truths know how to exist together in ways I never thought I will learn. This is the quietest of victories.