“We are never really in control. We just think we are when things happen to be going our way.”

Life just happens. It’s what you’re believing about life that makes you suffer.

That’s the purpose of stress. It’s a friend. It’s an alarm clock, built in to let you know that it’s time to do The Work.

The only way I can be angry at you is when I have thought, said, or done something that is unkind in my own opinion.

When you say or do anything to please, get, keep, influence, or control anyone or anything, fear is the cause and pain is the result.

The mind usually says, “I know, I know, I know.” But the “don’t-know mind” is where wisdom lives.

When we’re not defending and justifying, and we’re being very still, our answers can and do shock us.

Any thought of discomfort or stress is an alarm that lets you know you’re believing an untrue thought.

It’s difficult to seek other people’s love. It’s deadly. In seeking it you lose what is genuine. This is the prison we create for ourselves as we seek what we already have.

Nothing outside you can ever give you what you’re looking for.

Who would you be without the thought that happiness depends on someone else?

After you’ve been doing inquiry for a while, if you have the thought “She doesn’t love me,” you just get the immediate turnaround with a smile: “Oh, I’m not loving myself in this moment.”

My experience is that the teachers we need most are the people we’re living with right now.

Put your stressful thoughts on paper, question them, and have a great life.

The whole world is simply my story, projected back to me on the screen of my own perception. All of it.

I stopped waiting for the world to give me what I wanted; I started giving it to myself.

If you realized how beautiful you are, you would fall at your own feet.

I was ashamed of them and their ways of life. But now – yes, I love them; they are a part of my blood; they, with all their virtues and their faults, played a great part in forming my way of looking at life.

Often in winter the end of the day is like the final metaphor in a poem celebrating death: there is no way out.

I call [ordinary people] real people, because they have in themselves an incredible treasure – stories, a way of speaking, a way of sharing, an innocence and a perversity which I find very interesting to discover little by little.

It’s a way of living, sharing things with people who work with me, and they seem to enjoy it.

You are always in the world. Even in Vagabond. I am not on the road, I am not eating nothing.

Life is so full of miseries, minor and major; they press so close upon us at every step of the way, that it is hardly worthwhile to call one another’s attention to their presence.

When I did the first edit of Les plages, it was very dry and very square in a way. I was just saying the minimum. I said, Well, if this is the minimum, I don’t make it. So I tried to make it more refined.

Sometimes I say, If I had seen some masterpieces, maybe I wouldn’t have dared start. I started very – not innocent, but naïve in a way.