Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.

I want ... to consort with people whose emotions are not ... cold and standoffish.

A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

You're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe...

The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.