“When you relate to thoughts obsessively, you are actually feeding them because thoughts need your attention to survive. Once you begin to pay attention to them and categorize them, then they become very powerful.”

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.

There is no need to struggle to be free; the absence of struggle is in itself freedom.

A great deal of chaos in the world occurs because people don’t appreciate themselves. Having never developed sympathy or gentleness toward themselves, they cannot experience harmony or peace within themselves, and therefore, what they project to others is also inharmonious and confused.

It’s tougher to be vulnerable than to actually be tough.

Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.

Since life is an ever evolving process, one should flow in this process and discover how to actualize and expand oneself.

When you realize who you live for, and who’s important to please, a lot of people will actually start living.

The worst thing about poverty is not the actual living of it, but the shame of it.

The best thing about acting is that I get to lose myself in another character and actually get paid for it.

I fully expected that, by the end of the century, we would have achieved substantially more than we actually did.

Instead of dedicating your life to actualize a concept of what you should be like, actualize yourself.