“You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.”

If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself – so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.

The frightened mind that runs away from everyday terrors meets the seeking mind that wants a better world.

Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up, now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.

You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.

No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle.

Faith is an act of trust in the unknown.

People can’t be talked out of illusions.

It’s better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way.

No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.

Whenever you interact with people, don’t be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.

Stress makes us grow. Some people function better under stress.

The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it’s to imagine what is possible.

To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.

I’m suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

Don’t be different just for different’s sake. If you see it differently, function that way. Follow your own muse, always.

Society can’t function without shared prosperity.

The Second Amendment is outdated in the sense that its function has become obsolete.