Use what seems like poison as medicine. Use your personal suffering as the path to compassion for all beings.

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.

Be kinder to yourself. And then let your kindness flood the world.

Being satisfied with what we already have is a magical golden key to being alive in a full, unrestricted, and inspired way.

So war and peace start in the human heart. Whether that heart is open or whether that heart closes has global implications.

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

All you need to know is that the future is wide open and you are about to create it by what you do.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.

Feel the feelings and drop the story.

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

All situations teach you, and often it's the tough ones that teach you best.

The task I've been given seems absurd: To wait here on earth until I no longer exist.

I'm such a lover of music that it would be very hard for me to pinpoint it to a particular artist.

Why don't we save time and you just tell me what I want?

The difference with me is that I did inhale.

Improvisational things about picture-making... learned from working with the small camera early on have served me well in being able to think quickly when making [portraits].

We deceive ourselves when giving respect to the person for whom we have surrendered ourselves, when we respectively expect them to be as we would wish them to be.

What is important is to keep learning, to enjoy challenge, and to tolerate ambiguity. In the end there are no certain answers.

A famous actor, Edmund Kean, on his deathbed, was reported to have said, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."

My wife is - in the strictest sense - my sole companion, and I need no other. There is no vacancy in my mind any more than in my heart.

A perception of impossibility should never go unchallenged.