“We say that to ‘give up all evil and to develop the good’ is the heart of the Buddha’s teaching.”

If you haven’t wept deeply, you haven’t begun to meditate.

We have limited time in our life, therefore we should try to teach ourselves, not to teach others.

Investigate yourself to find the truth – inside, not outside. Knowing yourself is most important.

Why do we have time to breathe? Because we see the importance of the breath.

If suffering arises you must contemplate right there, you don’t have to run away.

A woman wanted to know how to deal with anger. I asked when anger arose whose anger it was. She said it was hers.

The Dharma Path is to keep walking forward. But the true Dharma has no going forward, no going backward, and no standing still.

Don’t fall for it. Whenever the mind is happy or sad, don’t fall for it. Its all a deception.

The forms of the world have their place, but in another way, there is nothing there. To be free, we need to respect both of these truths.

All religions are like different cars all moving in the same direction. People who don’t see it have no light in their hearts.

Mental activity is like a deadly poisonous cobra. If we don’t interfere with a cobra, how poisonous it may be, it simply goes its own away.

If you see certainty in that which is uncertain, you are bound to suffer

At some point your heart will tell itself what to do.

To the birds, the fruit may be sweet or sour or whatever. The birds say sweet or they say sour, but from the tree’s point of view, this is just the chattering of birds.

Some people are afraid of generosity. They feel they will be taken advantage of or oppressed.

All that I have said up to now has merely been words. When people come to see me, I have to say something. But it is best not to speak about these matters too much.

I don’t ever remember them telling us or teaching us that the only way we could be more successful is if other people were less successful. They never inculcated the belief that somehow, in order for us to climb the ladder, other people have to come down from the ladder.

What we reliably find is that people’s perseverance scores are actually higher than their passion scores, and I think it really does get to the fact that working hard is hard, but maybe finding your passion is even more difficult.

Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it’s very hard to teach racism to a teenager who’s listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It’s hard to say, ‘That guy is less than you.’ The kid is like, ‘I like that guy, he’s cool. How is he less than me?

I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.

I was a skateboarder when I was little; I still skateboard. I teach my kids how to skate.

There was one moment when I was in L.A., and he was teaching me a move. I just looked at him, thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m being taught to wrestle by Dwayne Johnson. What the hell?’

Were not teaching our students the importance of relationships with other people: how you work with them, what the relational pathology consists of, how you examine your own conscience, how you examine the inner world, how you examine your dreams.

What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that’s my function, but from time to time it’s possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.