“Listening is much more effective than trying to stop thought or cut it off.”

You breathe when you walk. You breathe when you stand. You breathe when you lie down.

A trust in the fundamental orderliness of the universe.

There is no way that we can understand it all. So the heart’s response to that mystery is faith.

If you have time to breathe you have time to meditate.

That which is threatening to the ego is liberating to the heart.

The best way to deal with excessive thinking is to just listen to it, to listen to the mind.

A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.

On the same principles, the ornithologist will direct you where to look for the greenlets, the wood-sparrow, or the chewink.

Nearly every season, I make the acquaintance of one or more new flowers. It takes years to exhaust the botanical treasures of any one considerable neighborhood, unless one makes a dead set at it, like an herbalist.

I’m a rapper but I’m more of a hustler.

I try to work out my mind more these days. I try to eat right. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and I take the skin off chicken. But I’m not on no special diet. I like my steak and potatoes, ice cream, doughnuts.

I crave and seek a natural explanation of all phenomena upon this earth, but the word ‘natural’ to me implies more than mere chemistry and physics.

The red squirrel is more common and less dignified than the gray, and oftener guilty of petty larceny about the barns and grain-fields.

And for me there’s still more material than 20 lifetimes that I can use up.