We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.

Live as if you were living for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.

The best way out is always through.

The insight of impermanence has the power to liberate us. You suddenly realise how foolish it is to be angry and to argue with each other. Life is so precious. Your anger has transformed into love.

Stress only happens when you resist life's events. If you are not pushing life away, or pulling it toward you, then you are not generating resistance. You are simply present.

Who are you? You think "I am a woman of this age, and I follow this philosophy". Those are all just ideas. You define yourself by what you believe. You have created a sense of stability inside, which generates a false but welcome sense of security.

By judging others, or by strongly identifying as something — your beliefs, religion, job — you make the "otherness" of others stronger. You are then not awake, and these mind patterns have you in their grip.

From the point of view of survival, "I am bad" is a safer perspective than "my parents are unreliable and may abandon me". It's better for the child to feel defective than to realise the attachment figures are unable to give everything it needs. This leads to feelings of not being good enough later in life.

Until you have some capacity to be mindful, you have no choice but to be lost in every next thought that arises. You can't notice thought as thought — it just feels like you. If they are angry thoughts, you are angry. Every time you're lost in thought, you're very likely telling yourself a story for the 15th time that you don't have the decency to find boring.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. We are made of our thoughts, we are molded by our thoughts. As we think, so we become.

Thousands of anxious thoughts appear all day long. It's a constant monitoring to see if we're gaining or losing ground in the grand approval sweepstakes. The unspoken belief is that unless people approve of you, you're worthless. The irony is that the struggle to win love and approval makes it very difficult to experience them.

If you ever let yourself feel good when people tell you that you're OK, you are preparing yourself to feel bad when they tell you you're not good. As long as you live to fulfill other people's expectations, you better watch what you wear, how you comb your hair. Do you call that human?

Bitterness is how we punish ourselves for other people's sins.

Because we listen autobiographically, we tend to evaluate (do I agree?), probe (ask questions from our own frame), advise (give counsel based on our own experience), or interpret (figure people out based on our own motives). If I'm trying to evaluate everything someone says, how free do they feel when speaking?

If two people have the same opinion, one is unnecessary.

You have an enormous amount of energy inside of you. It's always available to you. At any moment. The only reason you don't feel this energy all the time is because you block it. You block it by closing your heart. This energy is your birthright. And it's unlimited.

Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experiences and learning to befriend what is going on inside ourselves. Body awareness puts us in touch with our inner world. Simply noticing our annoyance, nervousness or anxiety immediately helps us shift our perspective.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

Character is the willingness to take responsibility for one's own life.

The trouble with people is that they are busy fixing things they don't understand. It never strikes us that things don't need to be fixed. This is a great illumination. They need to be understood. If you understood them, they would change.

There are no bad teams, only bad leaders. Believe in the mission, check your ego, stay humble and keep things simple.

Love is not primarily a relationship to one person; it's an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole. Love is an activity, a power of the soul.

To be concentrated to others means primarily to be able to listen. Most people listen to others without really listening. Any activity, if done in a concentrated fashion, makes one more awake — while every unconcentrated activity makes one sleepy.

The human soul doesn't want to be advised, fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard, and companioned exactly as it is.