If you love someone, the greatest gift you can give them is your presence.

The greatest obstacle to meditation is our expectation about what it should be.

The teaching of the Buddha is based on two truths: conventional truth and ultimate truth. Without understanding the relationship between these two, the deeper meaning of the Buddha's teaching cannot be understood.

The way is basically perfect. It is not a matter of practice or enlightenment.

My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.

Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.

The perfect moment is this one, not the one you're waiting for.

The key to happiness is inner peace. The greatest obstacles to inner peace are disturbing emotions such as anger, attachment, fear and suspicion.

Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.

Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that's all that's happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness--life's painful aspect--softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person.

You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather.

Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.

What we call "I" is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale.

The challenge in meditation is not to eliminate thinking but to understand the nature of thought itself.

Looking for peace is like looking for a turtle with a mustache: you won't be able to find it. But when your heart is ready, peace will come looking for you.

The Buddha's teaching is not a philosophy or a religion; it is a method of practice.

Intrinsically all living beings are Buddhas, just as ice and water are of the same substance.

When you understand that all phenomena are impermanent, unsatisfactory, and non-self, attachment naturally falls away.

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 purpose of life is to be happy, to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate. It is not to be well known, cited, or powerful.

In Zen there must be satori; there must be a general mental upheaval which destroys the old accumulations of intellection and lays down the foundation for a new life.

Every moment is a fresh beginning. Every breath is a new chance.

Life is like a cup of tea. It's all in how you make it.

The three characteristics - impermanence, suffering, and non-self - are not philosophical concepts but aspects of experience to be directly observed.

The willingness to empty ourselves and then seek our true nature is an expression of great and courageous love.

Freedom is not found in the absence of difficulty, but in our relationship to it.

There are only two days in the year that nothing can be done. One is called yesterday and the other is called tomorrow, so today is the right day to love, believe, do and mostly live.

Nothing can harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts.

If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it's not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.

Birth and death are neither two things nor one thing. Life is not an appearance, death is not a disappearance.

Zen proposes its solution by directly appealing to facts of personal experience and not to book-knowledge.

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.

Time passes unhindered. When we make ourselves better, we make the world better.