“Hoping means seeing that the outcome you want is possible and then working for it.”

I truly feel the best doctors are ones who are criticized by nurses, patients and family. They do not make excuses and learn from their mistakes.

Bobby and I were married in 1954 and by now we know that anger does not mean “I don’t love you” or “I want a divorce.” It means, “I am wounded and in need of love, and I feel safe telling you about it because you are my family.”

None of us are going to have perfect lives. Our own vision of what we think is good maybe different from what He [God] thinks. And we forget that. We think we know what’s best and we don’t.

What I learned was to live in my heart and to do what will make my happy, and that was not selfishness. It didn’t matter what job I took, my mother’s answer was, “Do what will make you happy.”

If you talk to your body, it will listen.

It can be tempting to blame others for our loss of direction. We get lots of information about life but little education in life from parents, teachers, and other authority figures who should know better from their experience. Information is about facts.

I had patients who didn’t die because they had too many pets to try to find homes for. It’s why women live longer than men with the same health problems.

You can’t control the world, but when you control your thoughts, you bring order.

What if Jesus was the only normal person who ever lived?

Be grateful simply for being alive. When you are grateful for life, pure and simple, your life becomes one you can be grateful for. That may strike you as circular or even backward logic, but your attitude really does have an effect on how things work out.

We destroy ourselves when we stop feeling. If you bury your feelings within you, you become a graveyard.

To me, God is an intelligent, loving, conscious energy and why do I say that? Well you need energy to create. You have to have a source. It’s undifferentiated energy which has intelligence or it couldn’t create.

Education is about wisdom and the knowledge of how to love and survive.

Remember that an act of love always benefits at least two people.

You still won’t be perfect, but success isn’t about perfection-it is about authenticity. You are a success if you are being your real, authentic self.

You cannot fail at being yourself. A cat doesn’t try to be a tiger, and you shouldn’t try to be something you aren’t. You are a process, not a product. Your job is to discover what you are and create that creature.

Magicians can do more by means of faith than physicians by the truth.

Black-and-whit e always looks modern, whatever that word means.

Therapy isn’t curing somebody of something; it is a means of helping a person explore himself, his life, his consciousness. My purpose as a therapist is to find out what it means to be human.

In Tibetan, authentic presence is wangthang, which literally means, ‘field of power’… The cause or the virtue that brings about authentic presence is emptying out and letting go. You have to be without clinging.

The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them.

You have writers that write about crazy characters, but that doesn’t mean the writer himself is crazy.

Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you’re deprived of it.

What’s better? Dogs or broomsticks? I mean will the world really ever know?