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

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.

The greatest obstacle to connecting with our joy is resentment.

If you follow your heart, you’re going to find that it is often extremely inconvenient.

It isn’t what happens to us that causes us to suffer; it’s what we say to ourselves about what happens.

Always keeping [the other prisoners] as murderers, thieves, that sort of thing, which has a certain irony to it, I guess. It’s a curious thing.

I like radio and live performing stuff. I don’t like the television stuff as much. Some people do. It takes a certain breed of cat. .

It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.

The price of training is always a certain trained incapacity: the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently.

That is very good. But never get into your head that your faith alone is true and every other is false. Know for certain that God without form is real and that God with form is also real.

In the darkest night to be certain of the dawn…to go through Hell and to continue to trust in the goodness of God-this is the challenge and the way.

Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics,

In short, the power of a certain kind of dream is such that death need not indicate finality at all but rather signify a metaphysical and metaphorical leap forward.