“I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.”

We are here on the planet only once, and might as well get a feel for the place.

What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.

Nature is, above all, profligate.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.

Experiencing the present purely is being empty and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.

She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.

Nothing moves a woman so deeply as the boyhood of the man she loves.

Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.

Art is like an ill-trained Labrador retriever that drags you out into traffic.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.

Nature’s silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block.

Your results are an expression of your level of awareness.

The practice of ‘asanas’ and ‘pranayama’ wards off disease and helps to maintain alertness.

We do not mature through age. We mature in awareness.

Give up identification with this mass of flesh as well as with what thinks it a mass. Both are intellectual imaginations. Recognise your true self as undifferentiated awareness, unaffected by time, past, present or future, and enter Peace.

Train your mind to see in all people, what they do not see in themselves. Begin to treat every person you come in contact with as the most important person in the world. Look at them with new awareness.

The real alchemy is transforming the base self into gold or into spiritual awareness. That’s really what new alchemy’s all about.

Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in eternal awareness or pure consciousness.

Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.