“It isn’t the things that are happening to us that cause us to suffer, it’s what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening. The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.”

Let your curiosity be greater than your fear.

You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.

Feeling irritated, restless, afraid, and hopeless is a reminder to listen more carefully.

Feel the feelings and drop the story.

The best spiritual instruction is when you wake up in the morning and say, ‘I wonder what’s going to happen today.’ And then carry that kind of curiosity through your life.

Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.

All situations teach you, and often it’s the tough ones that teach you best.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. Even if we run a hundred miles an hour to the other side of the continent, we find the very same problem awaiting us when we arrive.

Let difficulty transform you. And it will. In my experience, we just need help in learning how not to run away.

So war and peace start in the human heart. Whether that heart is open or whether that heart closes has global implications.

Anything we experience, no matter how challenging, can become an open pathway to awakening.

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.

Whatever happens in your life, joyful or painful, do not be swept away by reactivity. Be patient with yourself and don’t lose your sense of perspective.

All the wars, all the hatred, all the ignorance in the world come out of being so invested in our opinions.

We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.

I believe that the biggest problem that humanity faces is an ego sensitivity to finding out whether one is right or wrong and identifying what one’s strengths and weaknesses are.

The faithful believe that certain truths have been ‘revealed.’ The skeptics and secularists believe that truth is only to be sought by free inquiry and trial and error. Only one of those positions is dogmatic.

Some of the things you believe were never true. They were someone else’s fears. Give yourself a chance to examine your thoughts. Change those that are negative. You are deserving.

When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don’t believe as you do.

I truly believe that we are here to bless and prosper, each other.

Life is a self-fulfilling prophecy. What you believe about Life will be your experience of Life.

Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.

We have a right to believe whatever we want, but not everything we believe is right.