“Important thing to realize is the world is not here to make me happy. When you don't demand that the situation, or place, or person should make you happy, then actually the situation, place, or person is quite satisfying.”

“Do you really need to mentally label every sense perception and experience? Do you really need to have a reactive like/dislike relationship with life where you are in almost continuous conflict with situations and people? Or is that just a deep-seated mental habit that can be broken? Not by doing anything, but by allowing this moment to be as it is.”

“Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to "die before you die" --- and find that there is no death.”

“Once bliss becomes normal it's no longer bliss, it's just peace.”

“The past cannot survive in your presence. It can only survive in your absence.”

“There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same.”

“It sometimes occurs that memory has a personality of its own and volunteers or refuses its information at its will, not at mine.”

“Thought dissolves the material universe by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic.”

“Oh! that you could turn your eyes towards the napes of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your good selves.”

“Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghostlike we glide through nature, and should not know our place again.”

“The eye of prudence may never shut.”

“Such as we are made of, such we be.”

“Let us not look east and west for materials of conversation, but rest in presence and unity. A just feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, if speaking be more grateful than silence. When people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we be inhospitable. But things said for conversation are chalk eggs. Don't say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.”

“An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. He is strong, not to do, but to live; not in his arms, but in his heart; not as an agent, but as a fact.”

“I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.”

“So every bondman in his own hand bearsThe power to cancel his captivity.”

“Passion and desire bind your Heart. Remove the locks. Become a key, become a key . . .”

“Love sees with the heart and not with mind.”

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”

“Faster than spring-time showers comes thought on thought.”

“Rise up nimbly and go on your strange journey to the ocean of meanings.... Leave and don't look away from the sun as you go, in whose light you're sometimes crescent, sometimes full.”

“There is only one search: wandering... no dogma and no heresy.”

“Late, by myself, in the boat of myself, no light and no land anywhere, cloudcover thick. I try to stay just above the surface, yet I'm already under and living within the ocean.”