“Just fully being skillful involves total lack of inhibition. We are not afraid to be. We are not afraid to live. We must accept ourselves as being warriors. If we acknowledge ourselves as warriors, then there is a way in, because a warrior dares to be, like a tiger in the jungle.”

The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.

If you are telling the truth, then you can speak gently, and your words will have power.

Ego is constantly attempting to acquire and apply the teachings of spirituality for its own benefit.

When we talk about compassion we talk in terms of being kind. But compassion is not so much being kind; it is being creative [enough] to wake a person up

Warriorship is so tender, without skin, without tissue, naked and raw. It is soft and gentle. You have renounced putting on a new suit of armor. You have renounced growing a thick, hard skin. You are willing to expose naked flesh, bone and marrow to the world.

We have a fear of facing ourselves. That is the obstacle. Experiencing the innermost core of our existence is very embarrassing to a lot of people. A lot of people turn to something that they hope will liberate them without their having to face themselves. That is impossible.

The essence of warriorship, or the essence of human bravery, is refusing to give up on anyone or anything.

Artistic vision comes from a mind clear enough to fall in love with what we see.

We could almost say that being willing to be a fool is one of the first wisdoms. So acknowledging foolishness is always a very important and powerful experience. The phenomenal world can be perceived and seen properly if we see it from the perspective of being a fool.

A great deal of the chaos in the world occurs because people don’t appreciate themselves.

Becoming “awake” involves seeing our confusion more clearly.

In the garden of gentle sanity, May you be bombarded by coconuts of wakefulness.

The ideal of helping is to make others independent of you. You help them to become more independent rather than making them addicted to you.

The challenge of warriorship is to step out of the cocoon, to step out into space, by being brave and at the same time gentle

In order to develop love – universal love, cosmic love, whatever you would like to call it one must accept the whole situation of life as it is, both the light and the dark, the good and the bad. One must open oneself to life, communicate with it.

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.

He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed.

If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately.

That somehow distances us from actually taking part fully with the reality we do have, and that creates suffering.

I’m a crusader. I really believe in the First Amendment, and I use it fully, and I pay a price for that.

When you abide and accept everything completely and fully, you automatically go beyond.

Happiness is never a negative affair; it is to be won by men who are fully alive, full of the joy of living.

In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.

One of the hardest things for me to do is be fully open in a poem.