Activity is not achievement. It is not enough to rush about beginning a lot of things and keeping busy. A well-spent life is one that rounds out what it has begun.

Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny private, shell-bound realm - which we take to be the whole of existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world.

Nothing really worth having comes quickly and easily. If it did, I doubt that we would ever grow.

Everything beautiful has to be worked for.

Instead of looking at difficulties as deprivations, we can learn to recognize them as opportunities for deepening and widening our love.

A calm mind releases the most precious capacity a human being can have: the capacity to turn anger into compassion, fear into fearlessness, and hatred into love.

When the mind is still, we can become an instrument of peace.