“I contemplated my greed for peace. And I did not seek tranquillity anymore.”

We look directly into our suffering rather than try to become happy. The happiness that arises from this approach is reliable.

Meditation is a skilful letting go: gently but with resolution.

One should read them, listen to them, think about them, contemplate them, and investigate the present reality, the present experience with them. Then, and only then, can one insightfully know the truth beyond words.

A new day is here. Yesterday is a memory. Tomorrow is unknown. Now is the knowing.

Of course we can always imagine more perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everyone should behave. But it is not our task to create an ideal. It’s our task to see how it is, and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.

Suttas are not meant to be ‘sacred scriptures’ that tell us what to believe.

Instead of becoming the world’s expert on Buddhism, just let go, let go, let go.

We no longer expect the sensory world to satisfy us.

When we accept life as it is, we can respond appropriately to the way we’re experiencing it, rather than just reacting out of fear and aversion.

Whatever you think you are, that’s not what you are.

The empty mind – the pure mind – is not a blank, zero-land, where you’re not feeling or caring about anything.

The problem is grasping the clock. So what do I do? Let it go, lay it aside – put it down gently without any kind of aversion. Then I can pick it up again, see what time it is and lay it aside when necessary.

It’s an effulgence of the mind. It’s a brightness that is truly sensitive and accepting. It’s an ability to accept life as it is.

The goal lies away from the sensual world. It is not a rejection of the sensual world, but understanding it so well that we no longer seek it as an end in itself.

We no longer demand that sensory consciousness be anything other than an existing condition that we can use skillfully according to time and place.

The mind of an enlightened human being is flexible and adaptable.

Now that I’m an old, old veteran-age 29-I do things a lot differently. I don’t go to the gentlemen’s clubs anymore. I had to slow that down.

I once wrote a story about a writer who could not write anymore, and my friend Tennessee Williams said, ‘How could you dare write that story, it’s the most frightening work I have ever read.’ I was pretty well sunk while I was writing it.

Just as you were about to step on it, I asked you “Do you want to cross the footbridge to me?” – Immediately you did not want to anymore; and when I asked you again you remained silent.

I tend to not want to do that anymore. It’s not even that I don’t like it anymore: it’s that I keep trying to find ways for people to dislike me.

People don’t know how to be outrageous anymore.

Everything I have done or attempted to do for Scotland has always been for her benefit, never my own and I defy anyone to prove otherwise.

I’m not a big gambler anymore. I like to do it. I enjoy it instead of trying to make money off of it, because I realized you can’t make money gambling.

I hate when I hear bad things about him, because anyone who knows him would agree that he’s a good guy and really humble.