Loss of meaning is often part of the suffering that comes with physical loss, but it can also happen to people who have gained everything the world has to offer - who have made it in the eyes of the world - and suddenly find that their success or possessions are empty and unfulfilling.

The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.

Death is not the opposite of life. Life has no opposite. Death is the opposite of birth.

Be aware of your breathing as often as you are able, whenever you remember. Do that for one year, and it will be powerfully transformative. And it's free.

It's a wonderful thing to perceive the world and to interact with it and with other people and nature from that deep place of utter stillness, where the compulsion to immediately label and interpret whatever arises around you is no longer there.

Buddha is said to have given a "silent sermon" once during which he held up a flower and gazed at it. After a while, one of those present, a monk called Mahakasyapa, began to smile. He is said to have been the only one who had understood the sermon. According to legend, that smile (that is to say, realization) was handed down by twenty-eight successive masters and much later became the origin of Zen.

The vital function that pets fulfill in this world hasn't been fully recognized. They keep millions of people sane.