Empires rise and fall like the abdomen of God. It’s just the universe breathing.
The good and the wise lead quiet lives.
People have the illusion that all over the world, all the time, all kinds of fantastic things are happening. When in fact, over most of the world, most of the time, nothing is happening.
If you help others, you will be helped, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in 100 years, but you will be helped. Nature must pay off the debt . . . it is a mathematical law and all life is mathematics.
All search for happiness is misery and leads to more misery. The only happiness worth the name is the natural happiness of conscious being.
By any precise definition, Washington is a city of advanced depravity. There one meets and dines with the truly great killers of the age, but only the quirkily fastidious are offended, for the killers are urbane and learned gentlemen who discuss their work with wit and charm and know which tool to use on escargots.
Some people want to achieve immortality through their work or their descendants. I intend to achieve immortality by not dying.
It is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Work is life. Not having something to do with one’s life, something important or unique to your talents or however you put it, is a bigger killer than cancer.
The deeper the sorrow, the less tongue it has.
When you discover the management, there’s nothing to do but go to work for it.
You mustn’t force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.
Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans.
Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.
I believe that if you put fine food into a body with a crummy mind, you get a crummy body; but if you put crummy food into a body with expanded awareness, you get a fine body.
He was alone in the doorway, digging the street. Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness — everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being.
If the Lord wrote reports like a bureaucrat, Moses would have suffered a terrible hernia lugging those tablets down from the mountain.
Mind is liberated from matter not by ignoring it, but by penetrating it.
Because demands build up when needs are not admitted, acknowledgement of my needs subjectively, as a factor of my humanity, my dependent creatureliness, will help to prevent these same needs from degenerating into demands for actual fulfillment upon the objective world. Demands ask for fulfillment, needs require only expression.
It is in encounter that the creation reveals its formhood; it does not pour itself into senses that are waiting but deigns to meet those that are reaching out.
Miracles happen all the time. Doctors call them spontaneous remissions.
