Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.

Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were.

How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!

You can always improve your situation. But you do so by facing it, not by running away.

Compassion is the ability to see what needs doing right now and the willingness to do it right now.

You can't function in society if you don't involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you're playing a game.

The truth comes when you can see that your self-image is just a convenient reference point and nothing more, and that you as you had imagined yourself do not exist.

Do what you do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.

Truly compassionate action arises spontaneously without thought and is carried out in real action with no anticipation of reward and, indeed, no concept of a doer of that action.

Your role is to do and say the things that need to be done and said from your unique perspective.

You won’t understand life and death until you’re ready to set aside any hope of understanding life and death and just live your life until you die.

We are all we have

I stay glued to my piano and my work. I don't look up. I write, I produce, I do the next project, I do my job. I don't look up, and I try to be kind. I try to be kind to people. That's what I do.

Political people don't solve stuff - not really. Political people are like guys in pop music.

What degree of proof about the human catastrophe from global climate change do we need, before we are motivated to act to prevent it?

When a country is at war we want Congressmen, regardless of party, to back up the government of the United States.

If you hire people who are smarter than you, maybe you are showing that you are a little bit smarter than them.

often when I thought I joked, I told the truth, afraid to speak it except in jest.

The dead have a way of becoming saints in the eyes of their survivors.

Such as thy words are, such will thy affections be esteemed; and such will thy deeds be as thy affections and such thy life as thy deeds.

A sailing ship is no democracy; you don't caucus a crew as to where you'll go anymore than you inquire when they'd like to shorten sail.