"“The spirits and immortals of old had no special tricks; they were simply happy as could be, and they never worried.” This should be the motto of all cultivators. (p. 29)"

"When a proper person practices deviant dharma, even the deviant dharma becomes proper. When a deviant person practices proper dharma, even the proper dharma becomes deviant. (p. 5)"

"If we understand the Precepts, we will be able to enter deeply the entirety of the Buddhadharma. If we do not understand the Precepts, then we will drift like clouds in the sky, devoid of any foundation. (p. xvii)"

"In the Buddhadharma, equality is found even in the realm of the Buddhas. All Buddhas are equal. It is not that some Buddhas are bigger than others, some taller and some shorter, some better and some worse, some lighter and some darker. All Buddhas are in accord and they have no mutual obstruction. (p. 133)"

"...most people find it harder to give money than to slice off a piece of their flesh. (p. xvii)"

"When silence reaches an ultimate point, the light penetrates everywhere. (p. 26)"

"Education is without beginning or end. There is not a single location that is not a place of learning, and there is not a single moment that is not a time for learning. (DRBU website)"

"All afflictions are based on selfishness. That is why we have so much anger and so many troubles. (p. 33)"

"When you reach the end of the mountains and rivers, You are free to roam throughout the Dharma Realm. (p. 86)"

"Don’t get scared when you hear me call television, radios, and computers “man-eating goblins.” No need to be afraid. My hope is that you will clearly recognize these things for what they are. Once you recognize them, those electric gadgets lose their power to confuse you. But if you’re confused by them, then they can gobble you down. (p. 67)"

"In 1904, his friend, Anagarika Dharmapala, a Buddhist monk, attended one of his Harvard psychology classes. Upon seeing Dharmapala sitting amongst the students, James said to him, "Take my chair. You are better equipped to lecture on psychology than I." Dharmapala went on to give several lectures at Harvard. Following one of these presentations, James remarked, "This is the psychology everybody will be studying twenty-five years from now." Perhaps James was correct, if a bit premature."

"Buddhism and Brahminism lived in friendly rivalry for nearly fifteen hundred years meeting no opposition from alien foes. In in unlucky hour Mahmud of Ghazni came. The people were unprepared to meet the robber bands of Arabia."

"The constructive genius of the Aryans of India had brought to existence the most wonderful architectural beauties in the form of temples, toranas and dagobas and wall paintings showing their artistic and aesthetic genius, visible in the rock cut temples of Turkestan and India and in the Universities, libraries and colleges, the repositories of Aryan learning of two thousand years. Then India had only Buddhism as the national religion."

"Hygiene, sanitation, medical science, architecture, laws of dietetics, textile manufacture, floriculture, aesthetic science were unknown to the Carpenter of Galilee. Devils, prophetic sayings about the coming end of the world, miracles, and the teachings suited to a nomadic community presided by rain doctors, such is Christianity as taught by the master exorcist of Nazareth."

"The natural quality of mind is clear, awake, alert, and knowing. Free from fixation. By training in being present, we come to know the nature of our mind. So the more you train in being present - being right here - the more you begin to feel like your mind is sharpening up. The mind that can come back to the present is clearer and more refreshed, and it can better weather all the ambiguities, pains, and paradoxes of life."

"This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are."

"The principle of nowness is very important to any effort to establish an enlightened society."

"Emptiness is not what we thought. Neither is mindfulness or fear. Compassion—not what we thought. Love. Buddha nature. Courage."

"Every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, “Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?”"

"Generally speaking, we regard discomfort in any form as bad news. But for practitioners or spiritual warriors — people who have a certain hunger to know what is true — feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that... teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away."

"Meditation is an invitation to notice when we reach our limit and to not get carried away by hope and fear."

"Through meditation, we’re able to see clearly what’s going on with our thoughts and emotions, and we can also let them go."

"The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought... Nothing is what we thought."

"When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize."

"Impermanence becomes vivid in the present moment; so do compassion and wonder and courage. And so does fear."

"Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly."

"When anyone asks me how I got involved in Buddhism, I always say it was because I was so angry with my husband... When that marriage fell apart, I tried hard—very, very hard—to go back to some kind of comfort, some kind of security, some kind of familiar resting place... I knew that annihilation of my old dependent, clinging self was the only way to go."

"Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it."

"Meditation is just gently coming back again and again to what's right here."

"This is a standard meditation instruction that you can embody in the entirety of your life: do not act out and do not repress. See what happens if you don’t do either of those things."

"Meditation helps you to meet your edge; it’s where you actually come up against it and you start to lose it."

"We can't control what's going to happen but we can grow in awareness of what is happening."

"When we multitask and split up our mind into a million directions, we are actually creating our own suffering, because these habits strengthen strong emotional reactivity and discursive thought."

"But there is that feeling. And there’s always another challenge, and that keeps us humble. Life knocks you off your pedestal."

"The experience of a sad and tender heart is what gives birth to fearlessness."

"The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last — that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security."

"We all need to be reminded and encouraged to relax with whatever arises and bring whatever we encounter to the path."

"From this point of view, the only time we ever know what’s really going on is when the rug’s been pulled out and we can’t find anywhere to land. We use these situations either to wake ourselves up or to put ourselves to sleep."

"In fact, anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present without reference point, experiences groundlessness."

"The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable."

"Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth."

"But the Buddhist teachings are not only about removing the symptoms of suffering, they’re about actually removing the cause, or the root, of suffering."