If you ever find yourself defending a position or justifying anything, it means you have been defeated. It means you have not been able to accept the others point of view, or the fact that you may be wrong. Fear has conquered your mind and your heart. Your defences are up and you are running scared. It's not that the other person has conquered you, it's the self-created fear that is in control. Until you can accept the other (you don't have to agree) and you are not threatened by the other, your victories will be delayed. It's a funny old world when true winning is accepting not resisting, when victory is found in the wisdom to stop fighting and to begin engaging.
Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.
I know nothing about sex because I was always married.
Too bad Lassie didn't know how to ice skate, because then if she was in Holland on vacation in winter and someone said "Lassie, go skate for help," she could do it.
Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; hate less, love more and all good things are yours.
The witnessing soul is like the sky. The birds fly in the sky but they don't leave any footprints. That's what Buddha says, that the man who is awakened lives in such a way that he leaves no footprints. He is without wounds and without scars; he never looks back -- there is no point. He has lived that moment so totally that what is the need to look back again and again? He never looks ahead, he never looks back, he lives in the moment.
Love doesn't make the world go round. Love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
Bad habits are like chains that are too light to feel until they are too heavy to carry.
The true test of the American ideal is whether we’re able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time. Whether we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and history, or whether we act to shape them.
Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the real world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind
Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.
They say 'only fools live to the full'. Because only fools go where most of us fear to go, only fools do what many of us spend our lives avoiding. You don't have to climb Mount Everest, or cross the world in a hot air balloon to live to the full. Simply enter each day with a commitment not to avoid anything or anybody who comes your way. Then your Everests will come to you, in the form of difficult people and challenging situations, and the only thing you will need to conquer is our own fear and evasions. And when you do conquer, you will know that you have lived fully, for there is nothing more exhilarating than overcoming our own obstacles which, if the truth were known, are always only in our own minds. When you turn to face these inner obstacles and challenges some people call this real courage and you certainly are no fool.
This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own imperfections.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought.
You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.
