“Trying to run away from suffering is actually to run toward it.”

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.

To practice Dhamma means to observe and examine oneself.

Remember you dont meditate to get anything, but to get rid of things.

Do not be a bodhisattva, do not be an arahant, do not be anything at all. If you are a bodhisattva, you will suffer, if you are an arahant, you will suffer, if you are anything at all, you will suffer.

Read yourself, not books. Truth isn’t outside, that’s only memory, not wisdom. Memory without wisdom is like an empty thermos bottle – if you don’t fill it, it’s useless.

Meditation is like a single log of wood. Insight and investigation are one end of the log; calm and concentration are the other end. If you lift up the whole log, both sides come up at once. Which is concentration and which is insight? Just this mind.

Things are simply the way they are. They don’t give us suffering. Like a thorn: Does a sharp thorn give us suffering?

Where does rain come from? It comes from all the dirty water that evaporates from the earth, like urine and the water you throw out after washing your feet.

If you want to understand suffering you must look into the situation at hand.

If you listen to the Dhamma teachings but don’t practice you’re like a ladle in a soup pot.

Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

It comes to the one who rests upon the promises of the Word. It comes to the man who lives by faith as if in the actual possession of the answer to his prayer, although the enemy is still around him.

We realized that, Oh my God, we’re actually playing in THE Kremlin!.

It just seems to me that it’s hypocritical for us as a culture to say, “Bullying is a terrible thing,” when really, they are just reflecting what the society is doing.

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.

Invaluable….the best one-stop source I’ve seen for what various officials actually said at various times, suffused with intelligent analysis.

I actually find in America, there’s a slight snobbery about actors who go back and forth between big heavy dramas and popcorn fare. That always intrigues me, because that doesn’t exist in the same way in Britain. And I imagine it would be worse.

It’s actually safe to create a universe in your basement.