“The trouble with Westerners is that they want to witness their own enlightenment.”

I would like to say, ladies and gentlemen, that you shouldn’t be afraid of who you are. That’s the first key idea. You shouldn’t be afraid of who you are. You should NOT be afraid of who you are. It’s very important for you to realize that.

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.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.

I took a few piano lessons as a kid, but it didn’t last; I just learned piano from doing it over and over on my own, because I didn’t have many friends, and there was always a keyboard in the house.

I had never met anyone of my own age that was a Tory, so going to university and seeing people who were Tories and who believed in what I believed in was an eye-opener.

Vice is its own reward.

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

The man who owns up to arthritis in a beri-beri year is as lonely as a woman in a last month’s dress.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.