“The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.”

Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.

The ego-self constantly pushes reality away. It constructs a future out of empty expectations and a past out of regretful memories.

When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of, Nothing is left but to love.

The clash between science and religion has not shown that religion is false and science is true. It has shown that all systems of definition are relative to various purposes, and that none of them actually ‘grasp’ reality.

The past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead, for as our own proverb says, To travel well is better than to arrive.

Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.

We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we’re in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back form the present.

There is no other reality than present reality.

Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.

The source of all light is in the eye.

A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated.

You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.

Our love story comes to me in waves, in movie stills and long summer afternoons spent under a sky of incessant blue. I still think of your eyes in flashes of color, your hands in a frenetic, feverish blur-your smile a mosaic of light and shadow. I still find myself lost in those moments of abstraction.

Everything will be all right – you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.

New York is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction.