Hope and fear cannot alter the seasons

If you must begin then go all the way, because if you begin and quit, the unfinished business you have left behind begins to haunt you all the time.

The point is that whatever one is trying to learn, it is necessary to have firsthand experience, rather than learning from books or from teachers or by merely conforming to an already established pattern.

Sometimes one touches on a very painful spot where one is almost too shy to look into it, but somehow one still has to go through it. And by going into it, one finally achieves a real command of oneself. One gains a thorough knowledge of oneself for the first time.

The artist has tremendous power to change the world.

Delight in itself is the approach of sanity. Delight is to open our eyes to the reality of the situation rather than siding with this or that point of view.

When we clean up after ourselves, we have nothing to blame. When we begin to live our lives in that way, cleaning up after ourselves, what is left is further vision and further openness, which leads to cleaning up the rest of the world.