In taking life for granted, we fail to notice it.

The origin of the conflict, frustration, and anxiety we experience does not lie in the nature of the world itself but in our distorted conceptions of the world.

Buddhism, I think, is probably facing the single most difficult transition from one historical epoch to another, which is really the transition to modernity.

Consciousness is an emergent, contingent, and impermanent phenomenon. It has no magical capacity to break free from the field of events out of which it springs.

While 'Buddhism' suggests another belief system, 'dharma practice' suggests a course of action. The four ennobling truths are not propositions to believe; they are challenges to act.

What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176)

The problem with certainty is that it is static; it can do little but endlessly reassert itself. Uncertainty, by contrast, is full of unknowns, possibilities, and risks.

The greatest threat to compassion is the temptation to succumb to fantasies of moral superiority.

To embrace suffering culminates in greater empathy, the capacity to feel what it is like for the other to suffer, which is the ground for unsentimental compassion and love.

This body is fragile. It is just flesh. Listen to the heartbeat. Life depends on the pumping of a muscle.

We cannot choose whether to engage with the world, only how to.

Sometimes we do not have words to explain our emotions, just a smile is enough.

The familiarity of his kiss breathes me back to life.

Ignorance is no excuse-it's the real thing.

Faith is the wors curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.

The English have only three sauces - a white one, a brown one and a yellow one, and none of them have any flavor whatever.

His own enjoyment, or his own ease, was, in every particular, his ruling principle.

I'm more interested in the meanings and the bands that fill up the spaces known as new wave and post punk.

I pulled the Johnny character from the Jamaican Johnny Too Bad thing.

Things should all be moving toward the expression of a great idea.

It is certainly a greater and more wonderful work to change the minds of enemies, bringing about a change of soul, than to kill them.