Our lives are lived in intense and anxious struggle, in a swirl of speed and aggression, in competing, grasping, possessing and achieving, forever burdening ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations.

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.

Whatever we have done with our lives makes us what we are when we die. And everything, absolutely everything, counts.

It is compassion, then, that is the best protection; it is also, as the great masters of the past have always known, the source of all healing.

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

There would be no chance at all of getting to know death if it happened only once. But fortunately, life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change. Every time I hear the rush of a mountain stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own heartbeat, I hear the sound of impermanence. These changes, these small deaths, are our living links with death. They are death's pulses, death's heartbeat, prompting us to let go of all the things we cling to.

Death is like a mirror in which the true meaning of life is reflected.