“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.”

Enlightenment is ego’s ultimate disappointment.

Helping others is a question of being genuine and projecting that genuineness to others. This way of being doesn’t have to have a title or a name particularly. It is just being ultimately decent.

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

I actually think film and TV are sort of the same thing now. To me they’re all motion pictures. There’s a camera, a script, other actors and a director. Doing a sitcom is a little different.

I’m raised to actually think, to use my brain.

I think your ego gets in the way of making something good because it kind of blinds you from the actual art.

My objection to the church isn’t that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too .

It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial.

But the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous, since I had not actually won the Putnam competition… Thus Princeton became the choice for my graduate study location.

I actually dress up more in my home than I do walking down the street just because it is so much fun to play dress up.

We may treat of the Soul as in the body – whether it be set above it or actually within it – since the association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate.Now from this relation.