To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.

In the end, that's what we all need more than anything else: to be there for each other, in every kind of situation.

Difficult things provoke all your irritations and bring your habitual patterns to the surface. And that becomes the moment of truth. You have the choice to launch into your lousy habitual patterns, or to stay with the rawness and discomfort of the situation and let it transform you.

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.

The point is that our true nature is not some ideal that we have to live up to. It's who we are right now, and that's what we can make friends with and celebrate.

Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward.

Words themselves are neutral. It's the charge we add to them that matters