I believe in original sin. I find people profoundly bad and irresistibly funny.
If you’re going to care about the fall of the sparrow, you can’t pick and choose who’s going to be the sparrow. It’s everybody.
The truth is that everything is One, and this of course is not a numerical one.
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
No matter how convinced a Buddhist is that the world is an illusion, she invariably leaves a room by walking through a doorway rather than through a wall.
All the information I have about myself is from forged documents.
Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.
But it is not really difference the oppressor fears so much as similarity.
You know, it’s not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.
It’s in the darkness of men’s eyes that they get lost.
To know oneself, one should assert oneself. Psychology in action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
Sins become more subtle as you grow older: you commit sins of despair rather than of lust.
Real events don’t have endings, only the stories about them do.
Compassion has nothing to do with achievement at all. It is spacious, and very generous. When a person develops compassion, he is uncertain whether he is being generous to others or to himself, because compassion is environmental generosity. . . . We could say compassion is the ultimate attitude of wealth: an antipoverty attitude, a war on want.
We are the hurdles we leap to be ourselves.
When those closest to us respond to events differently than we do, when they seem to see the same scene as part of a different play, when they say things that we could not imagine saying in the same circumstances, the ground on which we stand seems to tremble and our footing is suddenly unsure.
The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now. . . . It is not a matter of faith; it is a matter of practice.
One cannot weep for the entire world. It is beyond human strength. One must choose.
Nothing in life is trivial. Life is whole wherever and whenever we touch it, and one moment or event is not less sacred than another.
Esalen’s Law: ( 1) You always teach others what you most need to learn yourself. (2) You are your own worst student.
Life is that which — pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially — interrupts.
