“Just know what is happening in your mind – not happy or sad about it, not attached. If you suffer see it, know it, and be empty. It’s like a letter – you have to open it before you can know what’s in it.”

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.

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

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.

Don’t be attached to visions or lights in meditation, don’t rise or fall with them.

Well, if it really was her anger, then she should be able to tell it to go away, shouldnt she? But it really isn’t hers to command.

You will have a steady awareness within yourself.

Where does peace arise? Peace arises whenever we let something go.

A madman and an arahant both smile, but the arahant knows why while the madman doesn’t.

We can always find time to breathe. In the same way, if we see the importance of meditation practice we will find the time to practice.

Truth is all there is. It’s like when you learned how to read, you can then read anywhere you go.

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss.

I chose to believe that God, a benign God, would understand our sufferings and forgive us our trespasses.

Jesus Christ did not suffer so that you would not suffer. He suffered so that when you suffer, you’ll become more like him.

To have a body is to suffer.

The white man arrogated to himself the right to rule and to be obeyed by the non-white; his mission, he claimed, was to “civilize” Africa. Under this cloak, the Europeans robbed the continent of vast riches and inflicted unimaginable suffering on the African people.

it would generally be found that he had suffered more from the apprehension of such evils as never happened to him than from those evils which had really befallen him.

To seek is to suffer. To seek nothing is bliss.

I believe man suffers from an appalling ignorance of his own nature. I produce my own view in the belief that it may be something like the truth.