Favorite Quotes

I cannot tell all the truth I know. If I did, if I said that all at once, the whole city would throw me out. When something must come out, I let it come. Even though everyone is telling me, “Don’t say it! Don’t do it!” It might be a thousand years before these words can be heard by those who are meant to hear them.
–Shams Tabriz

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
–Robert Frost

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
–Henry David Thoreau

In the information age, you don’t teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today, he’d have a talk show.
–Timothy Leary

You don’t tell the quality of a master by the size of his crowds.
–Richard Bach

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
–Khalil Gibran

Knowing constancy, the mind is open.
With an open mind, you will be openhearted.
Being openhearted you will act royally.
Being royal, you will attain the divine.
Being divine, you will be at one with the Tao.
Being at one with the Tao is eternal.
Though the body dies, the Tao will never pass away.
–Lao Tzu

If you are fully present in the moment with the object of your desire, then it’s yours forever. (paraphrased from a talk)
–Ngak’chang Rinpoche

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances. If there is any reaction, both are transformed.
–Carl Jung

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman’s life and exalts habit into partnership with the soul’s highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.
–George Eliot

The pain later is part of the happiness now. From the movie
–Shadowlands

Pleasure or pain, loss or gain, praise or blame─all the same.
–Shyamji Bhatnagar

The only difference between you and I, is that I remember my past lives.
–Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita

I didn’t arrive at the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind.
–Albert Einstein

You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety.
–Abraham Maslow

Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is unique as his specific opportunity.
–Victor Frankl

The last of human freedoms: The ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.
–Victor Frankl

The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness.
–Samuel Beckett

My commitment is to truth not consistency.
–Gandhi

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong.
–Gandhi

A human birth is hard to win, humanity and rest in the great spirit is hard to gain, and excellence in the path of wise law [dharma] is hard to win. Hardest of all to win is wisdom.
–Shankara

Wise beings can be peaceful in the midst of chaos, experiencing delight in the changing play of forms.
–Ram Dass

Emptiness is not really empty. Emptiness is full of everything. The “everything”─ just isn’t manifest.
–Ram Dass

We are in the perfect circumstances for our Souls to learn whatever they designed this whole game to learn.
–Ram Dass

What is freedom? It is awareness not trapped in attraction or aversion.
–Ram Dass

As we get closer to the inner gates of freedom, of enlightenment, of liberation, the subtle clingings will be fanned all the more and the opportunities for gratification keep increasing.
–Ram Dass

Each person gets their karmuppance. We get everything we want sooner or later, if not in this incarnation, then another. And often when we finally get it, we don’t want it. As the process of karmic fruition speeds up, our lives get freer and freer from attachment and we create less and less karma.
–Ram Dass

If we come back into form from having merged with God, what the Buddhist call nirvana, we are in the world but not of it. We play the cosmic sport. We fill the forms though there is no one home, it is just more lila, the dance of God.
–Ram Dass

If we can give up attachment to our roles as helpers, then maybe our clients can give up attachment to their roles as patients and we can meet as fellow souls on this incredible journey. We can fulfill the duties of our roles without being trapped by over-identification with them.
–Ram Dass

If you are a therapist, work on yourself, because your “patients” will be as free as you are. Therapy is as high as the therapist is.
–Ram Dass

Someone once asked a great sheikh what Sufism was. “The feeling of joy when sudden disappointment comes.” Don’t grieve for what doesn’t come. Some things that don’t happen keep disasters from happening.
–Rumi

Those that make you return, for whatever reason, to God’s solitude, be grateful to them. Worry about the others, who give you delicious comforts that keep you from prayer, friends are enemies sometimes, and enemies friends.
–Rumi

There is an animal called a porcupine. If you hit it with a stick, it extends its quills and gets bigger. The soul is a porcupine, made strong by stick-beating. So, a prophet’s soul is especially afflicted, because it has to become so powerful.
–Rumi

The body is a device to calculate the astronomy of the spirit. Look through that astrolabe and become oceanic.
–Rumi

Many actions which seem cruel are from a deep friendship. Many Demolitions are actually renovations.
–Rumi

Let body needs dwindle and soul decisions increase. Diminish what you give your physical self. Your spiritual eye will begin to open.
–Rumi

Any love based on physical beauty is not love.
–Rumi

He’s like a pearl on the deep bottom, wondering, inside his shell, Where’s the ocean?
–Rumi

Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands, or your own genuine solitude? Freedom or power over an entire nation?
A little while alone in your room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given you.
–Rumi

I am the slave of the moon
It’s the only thing I’m interested in.
So don’t talk to me about anything other than the moon, the candle, the sweetness of sugar.
–Rumi

Don’t ever speak the word “trouble” out loud.
Talk to me only of treasure.
–Rumi

They say the excitement of love is not part of soul growth. They say all this talk of love is sentimental mysticism. Those are the worst lies.
–Rumi