“Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and joy you have not yet begun to live.”

Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.

Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things.

Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.

To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.

The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.

Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger.

For although God is right with us and in us and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find him.

We cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great.

You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.

Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed – but hate these things in yourself, not in another.

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.

Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.

How can I be sincere if I am constantly changing my mind to conform with the shadow of what I think others expect of me?

But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.

The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Here was a chimpanzee using a tool. That was object modification- the crude beginning of tool making.

I loved you in pain and when I began to bleed I called it magic.

When we began, we approached it the way we did because we were not prepared to be out-of-work musicians, ever. We said either take it on as a serious commodity or don’t do it at all.

Ran out of time, before we even began. How long will the road not taken be starved of footprints?

A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.

It’s time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.

Woe to the statesman whose arguments for entering a war are not as convincing at its end as they were at the beginning, Bismarck had cautioned.

This is the end. For me the beginning of life.