“Anything which is troubling you, anything which is irritating you, THAT is your teacher.”

What’s so great about brightness? My flashlight has it. It can’t help us rid ourselves of our suffering.

Try to be mindful, and let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool.

The meditator simply knows them, they don’t enter his mind. That is, he has no clinging. He is simply the experiencer.

To define Buddhism without a lot of words and phrases, we can simply say, ‘Don’t cling or hold on to anything. Harmonize with actuality, with things as they are.’

If we practise like this and develop mindfulness continuously, wisdom arises quickly and this is a fast way of practice.

We protect virtue so that virtue will protect us.

Proper effort is not the effort to make something particular happen. It is the effort to be aware and awake each moment, the effort to overcome laziness and merit, the effort to make each activity of our day meditation.

If we see suffering then we don’t have suffering.

In cultivating generosity, we are only oppressing our greed and attachment. This allows our true nature to come out and become lighter and freer.

Learn to let go without struggle, simply let go, to be just as you are – no holding on, no attachment, free.

If we only make merit but have not stopped doing bad things, then we will never have a day of completion. It is like an overturned bowl which is left outside in the rain.

Whenever we feel that we are definitely right, so much so that we refuse to open up to anything or anybody else, right there we are wrong. It becomes wrong view.

I touch it and it rings! One day the wind may blow it off the shelf, or my elbow may knock it from the table.

The heart is the only book worth reading.

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.

Can anything good come of a backward way of thinking like judging someone based on skin color? No way.

Writing is hard work, and if anything’s true about the process, it’s that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper.

You can’t learn anything from being perfect.

The worst part of governing, the political side, is the grossest part, so that’s what they call it. So anything that reeks of that immediately gets tuned out by 70 percent of the population.

Today, … anything you can come up with that works is worth trying.

When I write, that takes over and I can’t do anything else.

I don’t think there’s anything that I would call essentially Brazilian in João Gilberto Noll work. In that regard, it translates very well to a cosmopolitan audience.

We need to block out the outside world; we need to disbelieve anything that would doubt us, because everyone will doubt us if we allow them that space.