We can begin to open our hearts to others when we have no hope of getting anything back. We just do it for its own sake.

We don’t sit in meditation to become good meditators. We sit in meditation so that we’ll be more awake in our lives.

We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be.

We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.

We are all capable of becoming fundamentalists because we get addicted to other people's wrongness.

We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn’t that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but that it’s a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it’s all mixed up together, it’s us: humanness.

What you do for yourself, any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself, will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.