The gift of learning to meditate is the greatest gift you can give yourself in this life. For it is only through meditation that you can undertake the journey to discover your true nature, and so find the stability and confidence you will need to live, and die, well; Meditation is the road to enlightenment.

To be a spiritual warrior means to develop a special kind of courage, one that is innately intelligent, gentle, and fearless. Spiritual warriors can still be frightened, but even so they are courageous enough to taste suffering, to relate clearly to their fundamental fear, and to draw out without evasion the lessons from difficulties.

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

Even though the meditator may leave the meditation, the meditation will not leave the meditator.

When you have learned, through discipline, to simplify your life, and so practiced the mindfulness of meditation, and through it loosened the hold of aggression, clinging, and negativity on your whole being, the wisdom of insight can slowly dawn. And in the all-revealing clarity of its sunlight, this insight can show you, distinctly and directly, both the subtlest workings of your own mind and the nature of reality.

Why, if we are as pragmatic as we claim, don't we begin to ask ourselves seriously: Where does our real future lie?

Western laziness consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues.