Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

No worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current American superstitions to the contrary.

The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.

It is also in despair of being able to understand or make any productive contribution to the highly organised chaos of our politico-economic system that large numbers of people simply abandon political and social commitments. They just let society be taken over by a pattern of organisation which is as self-proliferative as a weed, and whose ends and values are neither human nor instinctive but mechanical.

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

By going out of your mind, you come to your senses

We are not clear as to the role in life of these chemicals; nor are we clear as to the role of the physician. You know, of course, that in ancient times there was no clear distinction between priest and physician.

Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.

Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after.

The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings, the past and the future are not as real, but rather more real than the present.

The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events--that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies--and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.

I have suggested that behind almost all myth lies the mono-plot of the game of hide-and-seek.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.

Our view of reality is like a chart of the sea - the truer it is, the less likely we will become lost.

The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.

Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars.

We live in a culture where it has been rubbed into us in every conceivable way that to die is a terrible thing. And that is a tremendous disease from which our culture in particular suffers.

To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.

Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.

But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful.