“Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.” ~ Alan Watts
“One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, et cetera. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves.
“What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.” ~ Alain de Botton
“You will lose everything. Your money, your power, your fame, your success, perhaps even your memories. Your looks will go. Loved ones will die. Your body will fall apart. Everything that seems permanent is impermanent and will be smashed. Experience will gradually, or not so gradually, strip away everything that it can strip away. Waking up means facing this reality with open eyes and no longer turning away.
“But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost, and realising this is the key to unspeakable joy. Whoever or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you. This may sound trivial, obvious, like nothing, but really it is the key to everything, the why and how and wherefore of existence. Impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heartbreaking gratitude.
“Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar.” ~ Jeff Foster
“If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.” ~ Charlie Parker
”I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Don’t search for the answers which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually live your way into the answer.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
“Too often, people think that solving the world’s problems is based on conquering the earth, rather than touching the earth, touching ground.” ~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
“Maturity demands the equanimity and self-confidence to be fully engaged yet sufficiently detached to assess what’s going on. To be both actor and witness, no longer locked into the roller coaster of life’s ups and downs and shifting attachments, but now taking responsibility that things turn out as you want them to.” ~ Gabrielle Roth
“All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.” ~ Helen Keller
“The most important part of the practice is for the question to remain alive and for your whole body and mind to become a question. In Zen they say that you have to ask with the pores of your skin and the marrow of your bones. A Zen saying points out: Great questioning, great awakening; little questioning, little awakening; no questioning, no awakening.” ~ Martine Batchelor
“Hands make the world each day.” ~ Pablo Neruda
“The fundamental aim of Buddhist practice is not belief; it’s enlightenment, the awakening that takes place when illusion has been overcome. It may sound simple, but it’s probably the most difficult thing of all to achieve. It isn’t some kind of magical reward that someone can give you or that a strong belief will enable you to acquire. The true path to awakening is genuine discernment; it’s the very opposite of belief.” ~ Trinlay Tulku Rinpoche
“As we inhabit our body with increasing sensitivity, we learn its unspoken language and patterns, which gives us tremendous freedom to make choices. The practice of cutting thoughts and dispersing negative repetitive patterns can be simplified by attending to the patterns in the body first, before they begin to be spun around in the mind.” ~ Jill Satterfield
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life… I think that what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.” ~ Joseph Campbell
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” ~ Howard Thurman
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” ~ Mark Twain
“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends, and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.” ~ John Lennon
When the Dalai Lama was asked what surprised him the most, he said, “Man, because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived.”
“The quality of my Presence depends on the relation of my thought, my feeling, and my sensation. In order to be attuned to a more subtle force, the attention of each part needs to concentrate, to become charged with a new meaning and power to relate voluntarily. In this way the thinking purifies itself, as do the feeling and the sensation. Each plays its own role and functions in concert with the others for the same goal of being attuned with a more subtle Presence. This Presence needs to shine, to animate my body. It has an intelligence, a vision that is like a light in the darkness and thickness of my sleep.” ~ Jeanne de Salzmann
“Indeed, the ineffability of the air seems akin to the ineffability of awareness itself, and we should not be surprised that many indigenous peoples construe awareness, or ‘mind,’ not as a power that resides inside their heads, but rather as a quality that they themselves are inside of, along with the other animals and the plants, the mountains and the clouds.” ~ David Abram
“Truth is best served by recognizing a viewpoint as only a viewpoint, and refraining from taking that extra step of regarding it as true to the exclusion of all other views. In other words, all views—even correct views—are best held gently, rather than grasped firmly.” ~ Andrew Olendzki
“Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me, I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” ~ Frank Herbert
“Experiencing the worst, you look, and instead, here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see. Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as bird wings.” ~ Rumi
“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” ~ Joseph Campbell
“If a single person achieves the highest kind of love it will be sufficient to neutralize the hate of millions.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
“Remember that you don’t have to like or admire someone to feel compassion for that person. All you have to do is wish for that person to be happy.” ~ Thanissaro Bhikku
