We are most asleep when awake.
Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.
Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.
Be alert, be wakeful. You do not know when the moment comes. It is like a man away from home: he has left his house and put his servants in charge, each with his own work to do, and he has ordered the doorkeeper to stay awake. Keep awake, then, for you do not know when the master of the house is coming.
I have come one step away from everything. And here I stay, far from everything, one step away.
Her theme was happiness: what it was; what it was not; where we might find it, where not; and how, if found, it must be guarded. Never must we confound it with pleasure. Nor think sorrow its exact opposite.
“I don’t sing about myself,” Campo said. “I sing about life. I am happy, but life is sad. The songs don’t belong to me.”
As you look at many people’s lives, you see that their suffering is in a way gratifying, for they are comfortable in it. They make their lives a living hell, but a familiar one.
The ego, as a collection of our past experiences, is continually offering miserable lines of thought. It’s as if there were a stream with little fish swimming by, and when we hook one of them there is a judgement. The ego is constantly judging everybody and everything. It has its constant little chit chat about things that can happen in the future, things about the past, too, and these are the little fish that swim by. And what we learn to do — this is why it takes work — is not to reach out and grab a fish, you see.
For the good man to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a straight and narrow path compared to which his previous rectitude was flowery license.
Most people really believe that the Christian commandments (e.g., to love one’s neighbor as oneself) are intentionally a little too severe — like putting the clock ahead half an hour to make sure of not being late in the morning.
Recently my fingers have developed a prejudice against comparatives. They all follow this pattern: a squirrel is smaller than a tree; a bird is more musical than a tree. Each of us is the strongest one in his own skin. Characteristics should take off their hats to one another, instead of spitting in each other’s faces.
All that we do Is touched with ocean, yet we remain On the shore of what we know.
There once was a man who cried every time it snowed. He went to a psychotherapist. Now when the snow falls, he weeps for his mother, who died in the winter.
