"My former master taught me to accept birth and death." "Then what have you come to me for?" asked the master. "To learn to accept what lies in between."

My experience is that it's precisely the ones who don't know what to do with this life who are all hot and bothered about what they are going to do with another life.

the tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness. But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness – it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness, and it is always accompanied, of course, by the anxiety that you may lose the object of your attachment.

You're not living until it doesn't matter a tinker's damn to you whether you live or die. At that point you live. When you're ready to lose your life, you live it.

Ordinarily, everything we do is in our self-interest. Everything.

Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth.

The Rose does not preen herself to catch my eye. She blooms because she blooms. A saint is a saint until he knows he is one.