The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.

We think that the world is limited and explained by its past. We tend to think that what happened in the past determines what is going to happen next, and we do not see that it is exactly the other way around! What is always the source of the world is the present; the past doesn't explain a thing. The past trails behind the present like the wake of a ship and eventually disappears.

...mysticism and empiricism go together in opposition to scholasticism...they base themselves on the non-linear world of experience rather than the linear world of letters.

To feel that life is meaningless unless “I”

What keeps us from happiness is our inability to fully inhabit the present.

Any systems approaching perfect self-control also approaches perfect self-frustration.

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

It is obvious that the only interesting people are interested people, and to be completely interested is to have forgotten about "I".

We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.

Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.

Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.

There is nothing wrong with meditating just to meditate, in the same way that you listen to music just for the music. If you go to concerts to "get culture" or to improve your mind, you will sit there as deaf as a doorpost.

Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

Enlightenment remains unrealized so long as it is considered as a specific state to be attained, and for which there are standards of success.

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.

This-the immediate, everyday, and present experience-is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.

To know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely one with this universe.

It's so important to consider this question: What do I desire?

The wake doesn't drive the ship.

The police have enough work to keep them busy regulating automobile traffic, preventing robberies and crimes of violence and helping lost children and little old ladies find their way home. As long as the police confine themselves to such activities they are respected friends of the public. But as soon as they begin inquiring into people's private morals, they become nothing more than armed clergymen.

Life and love generate effort but effort will not generate them.

Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.

The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation..., the more elusive it becomes... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers.