“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.”

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.

The teachings say that wherever a problem arises it must be settled right there. Where suffering lies is right where non-suffering will arise, it ceases at the place where it arises.

If you want a chicken to be a duck, and a duck to be a chicken, you will suffer.

All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things.

Another way of judging the value of a prophet’s religious experience, therefore, would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message.

Speculation in oil stock companies was another great evil … From the first, oil men had to contend with wild fluctuations in the price of oil. …

An excuse which, if carried to its legitimate conclusion, would leave our business men weeping on one another’s shoulders over human frailty, while they picked one another’s pockets.

In our Country… one class of men makes war and leaves another to fight it out.

What I have a problem with is when it becomes another form of tokenization, of shrinking me into a symbol instead of a multilayered, female Asian artist.

But coming to human birth and lured by the courtships of this sphere, she takes up with another love, a mortal, leaves her father and falls.

Perfect love will never want the preeminence in everything, it will never want to take the place of another, it will always be willing to take the back seat.

Mainstream people dislike homosexuality because they can’t help concentrating on what homosexual men do to one another. And when you contemplate what people do, you think of yourself doing it. And they don’t like that. That’s the famous joke: