Tomorrow or the next life - which comes first, we never know.

Without our familiar props, we are faced with just ourselves, a person we do not know, an unnerving stranger with whom we have been living all the time but we never really wanted to meet. Isn't that why we have tried to fill every moment of time with noise and activity, however boring or trivial, to ensure that we are never left in silence with this stranger on our own?

We may idealize freedom, but when it comes to our habits, we are completely enslaved.

What we have to learn, in both meditation and in life, is to be free of attachment to the good experiences, and free of aversion to the negative ones.

This dying forces you to look into yourself. And in this, compassion is the only way. Love is the only way.

So often we want happiness, but the very way we pursue it is so clumsy and unskillful that it brings only more sorrow. Usually we assume we must grasp in order to have that something that will ensure our happiness. [...] Learning to live is learning to let go.

There would be no chance to get to know death at all ...if it happened only once.