That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, He said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful.
We are made for Light. There are moments of perfect happiness, moments when one feels so well, at peace with oneself and with others. Such moments of fullness exist. They are rare, perhaps, but we have all experienced them. Each of us is capable of living such moments. They continue to send signals to us even when we are in despair.
He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most. God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.
I like nothing more in the world than sitting on my ass doing nothing. And it’s not my fault I have this attitude, because I happen to have an amazingly comfortable ass. It may not look like much, but if you could sit on this baby for two minutes, you’d realize that getting off this ass would be a crime against nature.
Be in touch with excellence. Don’t get lost in your own moods; they wear out too easily.
What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money.
Underlying our glitzy modern consumer culture there is a deep spiritual undernourishment and malaise that manifests all kinds of symptoms: nervous disorders, loneliness, alienation, purposelessness. . . . So blanking out, running away, burying our heads in sand or videotape will take us nowhere in the long run. If we really want to solve our problems — and the world’s problems, for they stem from the same roots — we must open up and accept the reality of suffering with full awareness. . . . Then, strange as it may seem, we reap vast rewards. For suffering has its positive side. From it we derive the experience of depth: of the fullness of our humanity.
Where there is veneration, even a dog’s tooth emits light.
The realization that God is active in all that happens at every moment is the deepest knowledge that we can have in this life. . . . The path along which we go is in itself so extraordinary that there is no need to ornament it with extraneous wonders. It is a miracle and a constant delight, yet in itself has nothing about it to dazzle our senses, but it does turn all the ordinary affairs of life into things which are rare and wonderful.
I was high on life, but eventually I built up a tolerance.
Now I am thirty-six and I am in Nepal and I am finally remembering what I was told I would forget.
The voice inside the mountain speaks to me, tells me again not to be afraid, tells me that there is only love in this world. Our choice is to be in love or to be in fear. But to choose to be in love means to have a mountain inside of you, means to have the heart of the world inside you, means you will feel another’s suffering inside your own body and you will weep. . . . You will understand that this pain is your own because you are not separate, from life, or from anyone or anything else. But you will fall into a forgetting. You may die before you remember. You will forget that you know this, again and again. Do not be afraid. The body remembers, it never forgets. It is your own knowing that you hide from and do not know.
If you open your heart up and let all the love you have flow out of you, I promise that some highly dysfunctional, emotionally unavailable man will glom himself onto you and never let go.
You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.
It’s as though we have two selves or two natures or two wills with two contrary viewpoints. . . . Your lower self sees you as the center of the universe — your higher self sees you as a cell in the body of humanity.
True compassion does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings.
Love all that has been created by God, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf and every ray of light. Love the beasts and the birds, love the plants, love every separate fragment. If you love each separate fragment, you will understand the mystery of the whole resting in God. When you perceive this, your understanding of this mystery will grow from day to day until you come to love the whole world with a love that includes everything and excludes nothing.
