“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.”

He who dies before he dies does not die when he dies.

We take care of the future best by taking care of the present now.

Note that this journey is uniquely yours, no one else’s. So the path has to be your own. You cannot imitate somebody else’s journey and still be true to yourself. Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness in this way?

Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?

You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.

No one can listen to your body for you. To grow and heal, you have to take responsibility for listening to it yourself.

Practice sharing the fullness of your being, your best self, your enthusiasm, your vitality, your spirit, your trust, your openness, above all, your presence. Share it with yourself, with your family, with the world.

One way to look at meditation is as a kind of intrapsychic technology that’s been developed over thousands of years by traditions that know a lot about the mind/body connection.

The awareness is not part of the darkness or the pain; it holds the pain, and knows it, so it has to be more fundamental, and closer to what is healthy and strong and golden within you.

Mindfulness is about being fully awake in our lives. It is about perceiving the exquisite vividness of each moment. We also gain immediate access to our own powerful inner resources for insight, transformation, and healing.

Maybe the fear is that we are less than we think we are, when the actuality of it is that we are much much more.

Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.

You are only here now; you’re only alive in this moment.

Practice moment to moment non-judgemental awareness.

If we are honest with ourselves, most of us will have to admit that we live out our lives in an ocean of fear.

Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.

I talk to nurses and programmers, salespeople and firefighters – people who bust their tails every day. Not one of them – not one – stashes their money in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

Life is inherently risky. There is only one big risk you should avoid at all costs, and that is the risk of doing nothing.

We cannot control necessity, though we often persuade ourselves that certain things are our choice, when in truth we have been unavoidably impelled to them.

Don’t avoid the cliches – they are cliches because they work!

Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn’t being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love–it’s being unhappy together.

Everything has a beginning and an ending. Make peace with that and all will be well…In life we cannot avoid change, we cannot avoid loss. Freedom and happiness are found in the flexibility and ease with which we move through change.

There is magic in knocking down your most important domino day after day. All you have to do is avoid breaking the chain, one day at a time, until you generate a powerful new habit in your life.