“Obstacles are our friends: they teach us where we’re stuck.”

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.

The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

Since death is certain and the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?

The greatest obstacle to connecting with our joy is resentment.

I am not someone who likes cocktail parties or large dinner parties, but I have to attend them often. I much prefer very small dinners with close friends.

Sometimes you’ll want more for someone than they want for themselves. Sometimes you’ll want more from someone than they’re willing to give.

Why are you waiting around for someone who has not chosen you.

The life I love is making music with my friends.

It’s strange for my friends when they see me on TV and in magazines, because the person that they see doing interviews and pictures on the red carpet is not the person that they know.

If I should die, I have left no immortal work behind me — nothing to make my friends proud of my memory — but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.

Friendship creates only the illusion of not being alone.

Treat your kid like a darling for the first five years. For the next five years, scold them. By the time they turn sixteen, treat them like a friend. Your grown up children are your best friends.