«Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death»

«In my soul, humanity is a single part, a big gentle bird whose song I use to sing every early morning in the silence of the Universe.»

«In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.»

«In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don't try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.»

«Into each life some rain must fall, some days must be dark and dreary.»

«In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.»

«In the matter of stepping up to our true potential, everybody wants to go to heaven and nobody wants to die. We want all the goodies without paying the price.»

«Intellectually, we know for certain that we are on this planet for a very brief period, yet we tend to live as if we were going to live forever, as if there were no end to our life or to the lives of our friends and family. This not-so-subtle denial of death persists throughout our lives, unless we are lucky enough to get a dramatic, usually painful and invariably life-changing wake-up call. The moments of our lives are ephemeral gifts, and we can not afford to miss even one of them. Happily, you don't have to wait for a painful wake-up call. You can notice the miracle of your life right now. Awareness is a choice.»

«In our ludicrous efforts to 'change' and be perfect, we try to fashion a perfect world for ourselves. We start to imagine that we are actually in control of our world, which is further from reality than an all-parrot moon landing. The universe, our universe, is out of our control. We live on a speck drifting around in an infinite vacuum with countless trillions of other specks. Our world is in a perpetual state of perfect chaos and entropy, with everything falling apart and dying and being born haphazardly. Meanwhile, we try to make life as neat and clean and orderly as a computer research facility, when in fact it is more like a junkyard. It always has been, and it always will be, no matter how much fussing and sweating and striving we do to make it different.»

«In vain we chisel, as best we can, the mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny reappears continually.»