You be greater than your feelings. I don't demand this of you - life does. Otherwise you'll be washed away by feelings. You'll be washed out to sea and never seen again.

How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard.

Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?

Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.

In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees

Only in America, Rabbi Golden, do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles - and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn't their fault they were given a gift like speech - look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.