the more we abandon ill-will and hatred, the easier it will be to meditate.

The heart is always the place to go. Go home into your heart, where there is warmth, appreciation, gratitude and contentment

If we want to be loved, we are looking for a support system. If we want to love, we are looking for spiritual growth.

Eventually we will find (mostly in retrospect, of course) that we can be very grateful to those people who have made life most difficult for us.

A truly happy person is someone who is joyfully independent of outer conditions.

The Buddha compared anger with picking up hot coals with one's bare hands and trying to throw them at the person with whom one is angry. Who gets burned first? The one who is angry of course.

"Wholeheartedly" means that we give our time, love, and energy unstintingly.

From contact comes feeling. From feeling comes reaction. This is what keeps us in the cycle of birth and death. Our reactions to our feelings are our passport to rebirth.

As long as we have practiced neither concentration nor mindfulness, the ego takes itself for granted and remains its usual normal size, as big as the people around one will allow.

If we do not try, we will not know.

Mindfulness is a mental activity that in due course eliminates all suffering.

It is now common knowledge that the average American gains 7 pounds between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day.

I've seen so many lives turn around from the impossible. I have come to embrace the idea that even the simplest act of understanding, love and attention can produce the biggest results.

Revolution should be Syrian, cannot be revolution imported from abroad.

L.A.: Come on vacation, go home on probation.

How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?

I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that that destiny can eventually embrace the stars.

You can not achieve success without the risk of failure. If you are not afraid to fail, than you have a chance, but you are never going to get there unless you risk it.

Artists are supposed to be the ones with imagination. A good part of our job description is to get regular people to use theirs.

You think the pope is mad that Donald Trump said Two Corinthians instead of "second"? Get this. Pope Francis just said that contraception can be justified now.

My best writing has always been in journals.