The great gift of meditation is that it returns us to the simplicity of our own being.

When you note pain, you are not trying to make it go away. You are trying to understand its true nature.

The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there?

The key to transformation is not to fight with our experience but to open to it with awareness.

Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.

The first noble truth of the Buddha is that life contains suffering. The second noble truth is that the cause of suffering is craving.

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.

Instead of having a deep understanding of the teaching, we need a strong confidence in our teaching, which says that originally we have Buddha nature.

The noting mind and the object noted appear to occur as a pair. Through concentration they are seen to arise and vanish together.

Hope and fear come from feeling that we lack something; they come from a sense of poverty. We can't simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the present moment.

The most important thing in life is to know death is coming and to prepare for it.

The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of all kinds.

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.

Just as the great ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so also this teaching and discipline has one taste, the taste of liberation.

Suffering comes from our resistance to what is. Peace comes from our acceptance of what is.

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.

Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.

No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

When the mind is ready to understand, the truth will come to meet it.

The practice of mindfulness is simple: whatever you experience, you observe and note it.

Life is available only in the present moment.

To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don't need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.

There are many ways to meditate. But at the heart of them all is mindfulness.

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.

True happiness is born of letting go of what is unnecessary.

If it isn't good, let it die. If it doesn't die, make it good.

Mind training is based on the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time.

The real secret of the arts: always be a beginner.

The Buddha and all sentient beings are nothing but expressions of the one mind. There is nothing else.

Don't be a bodhisatta; don't be an arahant; don't be anything at all. Being something makes you suffer.

The supreme path is not to fabricate anything. The supreme meditation is not to be distracted.