It took me 40 or 50 years, but I had it from the beginning.
I speak of what helps me to live.
I speak of what is good.
I am not one of those that seeks to wander off, to find forgetfulness, by loving nothing, by diminishing their needs, their tastes, their desires, by leading their lives — that is, life — to the hateful end of their death. I do not insist upon subjecting the world solely by the potential force of the intellect. I want everything to be sensible, real, useful to me; for it is at this point I conceive my existence starts. Man cannot exist save in his own reality. He must be aware of it. If not, he exists for others but as a corpse, as a stone, or as manure.
We talk too much; we should talk less and draw more.
To the extent that our experiences reveal and foster and fulfill our inner nature, to that extent they are desirable experiences.
You cannot explain me with ‘isms.’ They are very bad for an artist. What one must believe in is color.
It is not the events of today that happened to you that matter (such as that you lost something or something went wrong or someone forgot you or spoke to you harshly, etc., etc.), but how you reacted to it all — that is, what states of yourself you were in — for it is here that your real life lies and if our inner states were right nothing in the nature of external states could overcome us. Try therefore to distinguish, as an exercise in living more consciously, between inner states and outer events, and try to meet any outer event, after noticing its nature, with the right inner attitude — that is, with the right state. And if you cannot, think afterwards about it — first try to define the nature of the events and notice if this kind of event often comes to you and try to see it more clearly in terms such as “This is called being late” or “This is called losing things” or “This is called receiving bad news” or “This is called unpleasant surprises” or “This is called hard work” or “This is called being ill.” Begin in this very simple way and you will soon see how different personal events, and so how in this respect one’s outer life, are changing all the time, and what you could not do at one moment, you can at another.
All information is imperfect.
Events are only the external form of what happens. Form carries with it no particular content. Because I once enjoyed myself during a Super Bowl, I have concluded that watching Super Bowls causes enjoyment. Or I went to several cocktail parties and did not enjoy myself and have concluded that cocktail parties cause boredom. Anticipation is always the exercise of such illogical connections. Otherwise I would feel no urge to picture the form of future events, realizing that content, not form, is the determiner of happiness, and content is always within me.
The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
I know you belong to everybody But you can’t deny that I’m you.
Perfectly indifferent I am! No joy no gratefulness Yet nothing to grieve over the absence of gratefulness.
Anxiety is the gap between the now and the later.
Sweet joy befall thee as in your own bosom you bear your heaven and earth and all you behold, tho it appears without, it is within,
In your imagination, of which this world of Mortality is but a shadow.
What is death, I ask: what is life, you ask.
Keep up! There is no liberation without labor . . . and there is no freedom which is free.
Abandon all hope, abandon any kind of location. It is just a wonderful experience to realize that you are actually lost, just swimming. We do not know, here with this beautiful stone Buddha, with each other in this room, where this is. Do you know where this is, where we are? If you think you know, that is not right.
Nobody on the outside, no, not even God himself, knows what a man suffers on the inside. There’s no language to convey it. It’s beyond all human comprehension. It’s so vast, so wide, so deep that even the angels with all their powers of understanding and all their powers of locomotion could never explore the whole of it. No, when a friend makes a call on you you’ve got to obey. You have to do for him what God himself wouldn’t do. It’s a law. Otherwise you’d fall apart, you’d bark in the night like a dog.
