“Embrace suffering, and you transform your relationship with what causes you to suffer, as well as your relationship with suffering itself.”

The truth is you can’t try to let go. Trying is the opposite of letting go. To let go is to relinquish trying. To let go is much more like to let be.

You can’t lose what you serve. That’s the secret. What you serve, you can’t lose. What you don’t serve and what you try to hold onto, you can’t hold onto. It’s always slipping out of your fingers.

The most difficult thing for spiritual seekers to do is to stop struggling, striving, seeking, and searching. Why? Because in the absence of struggle you don’t know who you are; you lose your boundaries.

What matters are not the truths other people tell us or the practices that we are able to mimic, but the spiritual discoveries we make through personal investigation.

A total acceptance of yourself brings about a total transcendence of yourself.

Real meditation is not about mastering a technique; it’s about letting go of control. This is meditation. Anything else is actually a form of concentration. Meditation and concentration are two different things. Concentration is a discipline.

As if it were their job to be nice to you, you put yourself at odds with what is, and suffering will surely follow.

It is one thing to touch a flame and know it is hot, but quite another to jump into that flame and be consumed by it.

My speaking is meant to shake you awake, not to tell you how to dream better.

If you prefer smoke over fire then get up now and leave. For I do not intend to perfume your mind’s clothing with more sooty knowledge.

A few minutes ago, you knew who you were-you had a history and a personality-but from this place of not knowing, you question all of that.

The beautiful thing about the truth of being is that it’s so unimaginably immediate.

Freedom is the disappearance of that which is searching for freedom.

Misery needs your conspiracy; it needs your help. Without your resistance misery cannot survive.

Ego is the movement of the mind toward objects of perception in the form of grasping, and away from objects in the form of aversion. This fundamentally is all the ego is.

To accept the degree of surrender needed to literally let go of all experience and all self-reference. Even in great revelations, there is almost always something that wants to claim, “I am this.”

I want everyone, regardless of gender, to live a life free of restriction or fear, able to pursue their own personal brand of happiness and fulfillment.

Nothing really worth having is easy to get. The hard-fought battles, the goals won with sacrifice, are the ones that matter.

My goal is to live the truly religious life, and express it in my music. If you live it, when you play there’s no problem because the music is part of the whole thing. To be a musician is really something. It goes very, very deep. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am – my faith, my knowledge, my being.

For as from the same piece of clay a potter may fashion either a pot or a tile, so the Devil may shape a witch into a wolf or a cat or even a goat, without subtracting from her and without adding to her at all.

Electrons and possibly x-rays to be able to get the architecture of these molecules, the molecular structures themselves, of very complex biological systems. That’s the ultimate goal.

Sports can unite a group of people from different backgrounds, all working together to achieve a common goal.

I thought in my Nobel Lecture I pointed that I was delighted that the Swedish Academy of Science did not quote anything about my current work right now, because the current work that my group is focusing on is actually both the time resolve.

We must not rest until right livelihood is within reach of every human being upon this earth we love and cherish.