“My advice to you is not to undertake the spiritual path. It is too difficult, too long, and is too demanding. I suggest you ask for your money back, and go home. This is not a picnic. It is really going to ask everything of you. So, it is best not to begin. However, if you do begin, it is best to finish.”

Hold the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun. Then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea.

Ultimately, that is the definition of bravery: not being afraid of yourself.

We say that the sun is behind the clouds, but actually it is not the sun but the city from which we view it that is behind the clouds. If we realized that the sun is never behind the clouds we might have a different attitude toward the whole thing.

The emphasis on practice is because it is the only time in your life you can steer your karmic situation.

It’s no use trying to be different than you are.

Sit and do nothing. Every once in a while a golden fish swims by and lays her golden eggs. You’ll know.

You can’t feel the earth if you can’t feel the space.

Sanity lies somewhere between the inhibitions of conventional morality and the looseness of extreme impulse, but the area in-between is very fuzzy.

Developing confidence is like watching the sun rise. First it seems very feeble and one wonders whether it will make it. Then it shines and shines.

There is more to fearlessness than merely having overcome fear… This state of being is not dependent on any external circumstances. It is individual dignity… that comes from being what we are, right now.

The discovery of magic can happen only when we transcend our embarrassment about being alive, when we have the bravery to proclaim the goodness and dignity of human life, without either hesitation or arrogance. Then magic can descend onto our existence.

We are always in transition. If you can just relax with that, you’ll have no problem.

Spirituality doesn’t exist on another level different from ordinary life.

Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people because you no longer regard people as a drain on your energy.

Fundamentally, no one can help us. If we seek to relieve our loneliness, we will be distracted from the path. Instead, we must make a relationship with loneliness until it becomes aloneness.

Whatever shakes you should without delay, right away, be incorporated into the path.

Instead of demanding a more equitable system for the distribution of social and economic goods, we blame the victim.

I hope the poem, as it goes on, gets more complicated, a little more demanding, a little more ambiguous or speculative, so that we’re drifting away from the casual beginning of the poem into something a little more serious.

When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools.

It takes some strength of soul–and not just individual strength, but collective understanding–to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.

To become a politics of asking women’s questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women–not a chosen few–shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture.