“The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.”

Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.

What everyone wants from life is continuous and genuine happiness.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.

Sadness diminishes a man’s powers.

Freedom is self-determination.

The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts.

In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.

A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation, not on death, but on life.

Minds, however, are conquered not by arms, but by love and nobility.

Desire nothing for yourself, which you do not desire for others.

Nothing in Nature is random. A thing appears random only through the incompleteness of our knowledge.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

The mind of God is all the mentality that is scattered over space and time, the diffused consciousness that animates the world.

I call him free who is led solely by reason.

Healing is a different type of pain. It’s the pain of becoming aware of the power of one’s strength and weakness, of one’s capacity to love or do damage to oneself and to others, and of how the most challenging person to control in life is ultimately yourself.

I knew I’d end up in show business in some capacity, eventually.

When you are right, everything around you is right, for the beautiful flow that is inside your heart has the capacity to spread its fragrance of oneness-light all around you.

Any situation that pushes our buttons is a situation where we don’t yet have the capacity to be unconditionally loving.

People always underestimate the ability of earth to increase its carrying capacity.

I’ve never understood the female capacity to avoid a direct answer to any question.

But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.

Through the sacred art of pausing, we develop the capacity to stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience. We begin to trust in our natural intelligence, in our naturally wise heart, in our capacity to open to whatever arises.