The great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for. Everybody's life really consists of small things. Greatness is a mental abstraction and a favorite fantasy of the ego. The paradox is that the foundation for greatness is the honoring of small things of the present moment instead of pursuing the idea of greatness.

You cannot receive what you don't give. Outflow determines inflow. Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you already have, but unless you allow it to flow out, you won't even know that you have it. This includes abundance.

Give yourself completely to the act of listening. Beyond the sounds there is something greater, a sacredness that cannot be understood through thought.

Humans are potentially capable of living in a state of consciousness compared to which normal wakefulness is like sleeping or dreaming.

Everything is as it is at any moment. There's no way of arguing, because you are arguing with reality - the isness of this moment. You can argue with it, but that's suffering.

Before I wrote The Power of Now, I had a vision that I had already written the book and that it was affecting the world. I had a sense there was already a book somehow in existence. I drew a circle on a piece of paper and it said "book." Then I wrote something about the effect the book had on the world, how it influenced my life and other people's lives, and how it came to be translated into many languages affecting hundreds of thousands of people.

Stress is a form of suffering, but it is accepted as normal. And it is normal in our world.