“Do everything with a mind that lets go. Do not expect praise or reward.”

Proper effort is not the effort to make something particular happen. It is the effort to be aware and awake each moment, the effort to overcome laziness and merit, the effort to make each activity of our day meditation.

If we see suffering then we don’t have suffering.

In cultivating generosity, we are only oppressing our greed and attachment. This allows our true nature to come out and become lighter and freer.

Learn to let go without struggle, simply let go, to be just as you are – no holding on, no attachment, free.

If we only make merit but have not stopped doing bad things, then we will never have a day of completion. It is like an overturned bowl which is left outside in the rain.

Whenever we feel that we are definitely right, so much so that we refuse to open up to anything or anybody else, right there we are wrong. It becomes wrong view.

I touch it and it rings! One day the wind may blow it off the shelf, or my elbow may knock it from the table.

The heart is the only book worth reading.

The only way to experience it is to put the teachings into practice. Once you taste it, you are no longer in any doubt about its flavour and you do not have to ask anyone else. The problem is solved.

We see that the sound is simply sound. If we understand like this, then there’s nothing more to it. We leave it be.

If it shouldn’t happen, it wouldn’t happen.

We need to develop meditation so that the understanding arises clearly within oneself. It is not the case that merely by listening to another’s explanation our defilements will disappear.

In practice, some come to see easily, some with difficulty. But whatever the case, never mind.

Only one book is worth reading: the heart.

The mind is intrinsically tranquil. Out of this tranquility, anxiety and confusion are born. If one sees and knows this confusion, then the mind is tranquil once more.

Know and watch your heart. It’s pure but emotions come to colour it.

I want to be here for a long time, so I am going to do everything I have to do to be here.

As a child I wanted to be a grown-up. I wanted to know everything – not that I like to talk about it. I hate intellectual conversation with intellectuals because I only care about my opinion.

Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved for the sake of something greater.

Geese are friends to no one, they bad mouth everybody and everything. But they are companionable once you get used to their ingratitude and false accusations.

Let me be accurate in everything, for though you and I have seen some strange things together, you may at the first think that I, Van Helsing, am mad. That the many horrors and the so long strain on nerves has at the last turn my brain.

But, hey I did everything the right way and earned my spot in this game, nothing was given to me.

Music is where I started. It’s kind of the base of everything.

All things are in the Universe, and the universe is in all things: we in it, and it in us; in this way everything concurs in a perfect unity.