“What more wonderful and consoling gift could you give to dying people than the knowledge that they are being prayed for, and that you are taking on their suffering and purifying their negative karma through your practice for them?”

How important it is to be skillful and gentle with ourselves, without becoming disheartened or giving up, but trusting the spiritual path and knowing that it has its own laws and its own dynamics.

Devote the mind to confusion and we know only too well, if we´re honest, that it will become a dark master of confusion, adept in its addictions, subtle and perversely supple in its slaveries.

The spiritual journey is one of continuous learning and purification. When you know this, you become humble.

All too often people come to meditation in the hope of extraordinary results, like visions, lights, or some supernatural miracle.

The real glory of meditation lies not in any method but in its continual living experience of presence, in its bliss, clarity, peace, and most important of all, complete absence of grasping.

At the moment of death, there are two things that count: whatever we have done in our lives, and what state of mind we are in at that very moment.

When we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us.

How we live now can cost us our entire future.

When you realize the nature of mind, layers of confusion peel away. You don’t actually “become” a buddha, you simply cease, slowly, to be deluded. And being a buddha is not being some omnipotent spiritual superman, but becoming at last a true human being.

The act of meditation is being spacious.

Theories are like patches on a coat, one day they just wear off.

Why exactly are we so frightened of death that we avoid looking at it altogether? Somewhere, deep down, we know we cannot avoid facing death forever.

Switch on the television or glance at the newspaper: You will see death everywhere. Yet, did the victims of those plane crashes and car accidents expect to die? They took life for granted, as we do.

In meditation take care not to impose anything on the mind, or to tax it. When you meditate there should be no effort to control, and no attempt to be peaceful.

We may idealize freedom, but when it comes to our habits, we are completely enslaved.

And in the all-revealing clarity of its sunlight, this insight can show you, distinctly and directly, both the subtlest workings of your own mind and the nature of reality.

If I read the newspaper I come out dirtier than I went in. If I read my Bible, I come out cleaner than I went in, and I like being clean!

In my first few years of being in New York, I had a major identity crisis because I’d never stayed in one place for so long.

Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.

When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity.

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.

I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.

And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.