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

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.

What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.

We confuse money with actual wealth.

If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.

Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

Like too much alcohol, self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double.

Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

The cartooning was always just an abstraction. It was an income. It was making me famous. It was allowing me to go and do other things that I’d wanted to do.

Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; its a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.

Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling.

We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.

All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.

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.