“In the end it’s all very simple. Either we give ourselves to Silence or we don’t.”

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.”

Enlightenment is a destructive process.

As you rest into stillness more profoundly, awareness becomes free of the mind’s compulsive control, contractions, and identifications.

When you see that everything is a momentary display of reality, then you stop resisting it. Resistance hurts, only every single time. Love is the state of nonresistance.

Meditation is a teaching which offers you the possibility of breaking free of this egoic state of consciousness and coming into a whole new realization of who and what you truly are. And all this starts with the willingness to question.

The unknown, our own true nature, has the capacity to wake itself up when you start to fall in love with letting go of all the mental structures you hold onto. Contemplate this: there is no such thing as a true belief.

Everybody is free to be as they are. Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you,

The thing that was most interesting to me was getting my first prints back from the printer and realizing photography doesn’t end with the click of a button, it starts there. Printing is so exciting.

I always try to write a song to work things out with myself and I want to do it with a little punchline at the end, because I never want to remember anything bad in my life.

I watch everybody every night, from sitting down to being on their feet at the end, and I feel a sense of reinvention, of caring, presenting these songs in their purest form.

I think you fall out of love with theater while you’re doing your eighth show of your eighteenth week and your body is saying, “Please make this end.”

When you wrestle with a pig, he has fun, and you just end up dirty.

Count Basie practically adopted me at 13. We became closer and closer and I ended up conducting for him and Sinatra.

God’s words trump all opinions, including mine, and in the end, I believe God’s words lead to life.

I’m holding on so tightly to the promise that if nothing lasts forever, someday, this sadness will end too.