“There’s something more to life than what we see on the surface.”

You must choose between your attachments and happiness.

You don’t awaken, what has eternally been awake realizes itself. That which is eternally awake is what you are.

Meditation is a dress rehearsal for death.

What gets taken away are all the exterior means we thought we wanted love to come to us. You have the choice to notice the perfect set up to see love is exactly what you are.

Grief, unresisted, is grace. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt anymore, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t rip your heart out….In great grief, there’s an incredible love in it. In love there’s a tinge of bitter. In true love.

The biggest barrier to awakening is the belief that it is something rare.

When a group of people come together as a response to that kind of inward call, it creates a very powerful environment, where truth is held in the highest esteem and the reality of our being responds to that deepest intention.

You’re willing to realize that maybe everything you’ve ever thought about yourself really isn’t true.

The light of consciousness has no mind to change or alter anything. When you start to see the light that you really are, the light waking up in you, the radiance, you realize it has no intention to change you.

Neither one of these thoughts hold any intrinsic reality. They are an overlay. When someone says, ‘I love you,’ he is telling you about himself, not you. When someone says, ‘I hate you,’ she is telling you about herself, not you. World views are self views-literally.

Enlightenment is, in the end, nothing more than the natural state of being.

To be free of fear is to be full of Love.

Eventually, in the state of liberation, meditation will simply become your natural condition.

If we know who and what we are very thoroughly, we will express and manifest that in what we do. It is all very simple.

Most human beings spend their lives battling with opposing inner forces: what they think they should do versus what they are doing; how they feel about themselves versus how they are; whether they think they’re right and worthy or wrong and unworthy.

Since everything is already the Supreme Buddha Nature, where are you going to find it?

Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young.

Providing – that’s not love. Being there – that’s more important. I mean, we see that. We see that with all these rich socialites. They’re crying out for attention; they’re hurting for love. I’m not being judgmental.

Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.

Fashions pass quickly, and nothing is more pathetic than those puppets of fashion outrageously made up one day, pale the next, pleated or ironed stiff, libertine or ascetic.

People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.

Towards midnight the rain ceased and the clouds drifted away, so that the sky was scattered once more with the incredible lamps of stars.

Hitler’s vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording . . . Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science.

I’m proud to have been a Yankee. But I have found more happiness and contentment since I came back home to San Francisco than any man has a right to deserve. This is the friendliest city in the world.