“Meditation is really a non-doing. It is the only human endeavor I know of being where you already are.”

Perhaps we just need little reminders from time to time that we are already dignified, deserving, worthy.

Arriving someplace more desirable at some future time is an illusion. This is it.

Just stopping, is a radical act of sanity and love.

Voluntary simplicity means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more.

The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment to moment.

We must be willing to encounter darkness and despair when they come up and face them, over and over again if need be, without running away or numbing ourselves in the thousands of ways we conjure up to avoid the unavoidable.

Living in a chronic state of unawareness can cause us to miss much of what is most beautiful and meaningful in our lives.

Healing is a coming to terms with things as they are, rather than struggling to force them to be as they once were, or as we would like them to be, to feel secure or to have what we sometimes think of as our own way.

Patience is a form of wisdom. It demonstrates that we understand and accept the fact that sometimes things must unfold in their own time.

When you pay attention to boredom it gets unbelievably interesting.

Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.

Mindfulness is not about getting anywhere else.

Mindful parenting is the hardest job on the planet, but it’s also one that has the potential for the deepest kinds of satisfactions over the life span, and the greatest feelings of interconnectedness and community and belonging.

Mindfulness is a way of paying attention, on purpose and non-judgmentally, to what goes on in the present moment in your body, mind and the world around you.

See for yourself whether letting go when a part of you really wants to hold on doesn’t bring a deeper satisfaction than clinging.

Paying attention and awareness are universal capacities of human beings.

I think probably kindness is my number one attribute in a human being. I’ll put it before any of the things like courage or bravery or generosity or anything else.

Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.

God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.

I still think that the greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, just having no one. That is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience.

A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.

No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.

Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together!

We should just come together as people. I think it’s really important to come together as humans, not as white people or black people, green and blue people.