If we were meant to stay in one place, we’d have roots instead of feet.

If you have a gun you can rob a bank, if you have a bank you can rob everyone.

When the going gets weird the weird turn pro.

Inspiration move me brightly
light the song with sense and color
hold away despair
more than this I will not ask
faced with mysteries dark and vast
statements seem vain at last.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it’s time to reform.

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company

What have we to lose from love
except what lacks foundation
Words can only carve the space
we fill with expectation

A little elfin magic goes a long way

Art is what you can get away with.

Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel shamed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn’t drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, “It is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver”.

Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.

If you’re not failing every now and again it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.

Friends are God’s way of apologizing for your family.

That’s my opinion and if you don’t like it, well, I have others.

Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.

Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach.

There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.

Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to cut roast beef.

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being.

When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing.

Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have always known it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.

What shall we say, shall we call it by a name
As well to count the angels dancing on a pin.

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.

Now tequila may be the favored beverage of outlaws but that doesn’t mean it gives them preferential treatment. In fact, tequila probably has betrayed as many outlaws as has the central nervous system and dissatisfied wives. Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard god who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!

People are never perfect, but love can be.

The world is a wonderfully weird place, consensual reality is significantly flawed, no institution can be trusted, certainty is a mirage, security a delusion, and the tyranny of the dull mind forever threatens — but our lives are not as limited as we think they are, all things are possible, laughter is holier than piety, freedom is sweeter than fame, and in the end it’s love and love alone that really matters.

Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.

Don’t worry too much about what’s broken, celebrate what works.

Man Plans, God Laughs.

God does not ask us to succeed. He merely asks us to remain faithful.

All war must be just the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it.

Liberty resides in the rights of that person whose views you hold most odious.

Before criticizing people, walk a mile in their shoes. Then when you do criticize them, you will be a mile away and have their shoes.

I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

My basic theory is that the written word was actually a virus that made the spoken word possible. The word has not been recognized as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host…

The same thing that makes you live can kill you in the end.

We got a thousand points of light for the homeless man, we got a kinder, gentler machine gun hand

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that.

Cats treat humans the way beautiful women treat men.

Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.

Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.

Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.

Sometimes paranoia is just having all the facts.

All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

Are we to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face, or what’s behind it?

I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.

Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

None are more helplessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

The American system of Democracy will prevail until the politicians discover that they can bribe the electorate with their own money.

My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

We have statisticians who systematize the static – how about ecstatisticians who systematize the ecstatic?

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

You’re only as young as the last time you changed your mind.

People who think they are crazy enough to change the world, are the ones who actually do.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Nothing is more important than reconnecting with your bliss. Nothing is as rich. Nothing is more real.

If you want to reach a state of bliss, then go beyond your ego and the internal dialogue. Make a decision to relinquish the need to control, the need to be approved, and the need to judge. Those are the three things the ego is doing all the time. It’s very important to be aware of them every time they come up.

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.

This is a precious moment, but it is transient. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.

Internet mirrors society. If you don’t like what you see in the mirror, don’t break the mirror.

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

You have two ears and one mouth. Use them proportionally.

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.

Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot masturbate.

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward.

You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.

The important thing is this, to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.

The soul does not love, it is love itself
It does not exist, It is existence itself
It does not know, It is knowledge itself

They tell you you’ll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don’t tell you is you won’t miss it much.

The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.

If she’s amazing, she won’t be easy. If she’s easy, she won’t be amazing. If she’s worth it, you won’t give up. If you give up you’re not worthy…Truth is, everybody is going to to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.

There is pleasure and there is bliss. Forgo the first to poses the second.

There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle, or you can live as if everything is a miracle

Steal a little and they throw you in jail steal a lot and they make you a king.

A programmer is a device that converts caffeine into error messages.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask a creative person how they did something, they may feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

True friends will stab you in the front.

Speak the truth even if your voice shakes.

The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready, it goes on because it’s eleven thirty.

It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.

Sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears.

Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

The best things in life are free. The second best are very expensive.

The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.

We’re in a giant car heading toward a brick wall and everyone’s arguing over where they’re going to sit.

The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

Almost everything comes from nothing.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.

Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion.

You can’t learn in school what the world is going to do next year.

I became insane with long intervals of horible sanity.

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.

Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It’s so simple and obvious. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to acheive something beyond themselves.

It always seems impossible until it’s done.

Give the ones you love wings to fly, roots to come back and reasons to stay.

Being honest may not get you many friends, but it’ll always get you the right ones.

Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.

Earth laughs in flowers.

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.

The worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

Patriotism is the belief your country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.

Life’s biggest tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

The strength of the drive determines the force required to suppress it.

Every morning we are born again. It is what we do today that matters most.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

I believe there is a soul and the soul comes into the world to learn about love in the presence of fear and faith in the presence of doubt. For this reason I think our efforts to perfect human reality are doomed to fail exactly as often as they proceed, since a genuinely perfect world would offer neither fear nor doubt. In this view, both life and technology are zero-sum games. We vanquish old problems and create as many new ones in the process. We achieve local advances while elsewhere we’re beaten back. We ascend through increasing complexity, both in phylogeny and history, and yet suffering continues unabated. I think the goal lies less in creating a perfect world than in continuing the effort. The greatest human achievement is not technology. It is hope.

Rule your mind or it will rule you.

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity…and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.

Sometimes the tip of my tongue is the barrel of a gun and it’s loaded.

A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it.

I think the law of attraction has been misstated. You do not attract what you want. You attract what you are. That’s how the law of attraction works.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?

God is a comedian playing to an audience that is too afraid to laugh.

What you meet in another being is the projection of your own evolution.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Love is not selective, just as the light of the sun is not selective. It does not make one person special. It is not exclusive. Exclusivity is not the love of God but the ‘love’ of ego. However, the intensity with which true love is felt can vary. There may be one person who reflects your love back to you more clearly and more intensely than others, and if that person feels the same toward you, it can be said that you are in a love relationship with him or her. The bond that connects you with that person is the same bond that connects you with the person sitting next to you on a bus, or with a bird, a tree, a flower. Only the degree of intensity with which it is felt differs.

Most people die when they’re twenty-five but aren’t buried until they are seventy-five.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.

When people get married because they think it’s a long-time love affair they’ll be divorced very soon because all love affairs end in disappointment but marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.

Coincidence is god’s way of remaining anonymous.

Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth.

The secret of the enjoyment of pleasure is to know when to stop. We have to learn the art of enjoying things BECAUSE they are impermanent.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

The greatest gift you can give somebody is your own personal development. I used to say, ‘if you will take care of me, I will take care of you’. Now I say, ‘I will take care of me for you, if you will take care of you for me’.

Happiness and suffering are states of mind and so their main causes are not to be found outside the mind. If we want to be truly happy and free from suffering, we must learn how to control our mind.

It is very important to identify the actual cause of whatever unhappiness we feel. If we are forever blaming our difficulties on others, this is a sure sign that there are still many problems and faults within our own mind.

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.

Freedom lies in being bold.

To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.

Love me when I least deserve it, because that’s when I really need it.

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.

Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come.

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

It is basically an intellectual block to find it incredible that you have more than one life. It’s just as incredible that we have this one. It is still more incredible to suppose that what has happened once cannot happen again.

Hearts united in pain and sorrow will not be separated by joy and happiness. Bonds that are woven in sadness are stronger than the ties of joy and pleasure. Love that is washed by tears will remain eternally pure and faithful.

Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues. You can tell by the way she smiles.

Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.

In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.

The best medicine I have found is to love a woman.

In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.

Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.

Our interactions with one another reflect a dance between love and fear.

What Einstein demonstrated in physics is equally true of all other aspects of the cosmos: all reality is relative. Each reality is true only within given limits. It is only one possible version of the way things are. There are always multiple versions of reality. To awaken from any single reality is to recognize its relative nature. Meditation is a device to do just that.

Love is the most transformative medicine for love slowly transforms you into what psychedelics only get you to glimpse.

The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.

You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.

It is only when you begin to understand that if you and I are truly in love, if I go to the place in me that is love and you to the place in you that is love we are ‘together’ in Love. We start to understand that what love means is that we are sharing a common state together. That state exists in you and it exists in me.

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds. It dies of weariness, of withereings of tarnishings.

Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness.

Most people would rather be certain they’re miserable, than risk being happy.

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.

Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Observe your thoughts, don’t believe them.

Don’t keep searching for the truth, just let go of your opinions.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Dreams are the answers to questions that we haven’t yet figured out how to ask.

The collective dream is the hypnosis of social conditioning. Only sages, psychotics & geniuses manage to break free.

Awareness is the key. Do we see the stories that we’re telling ourselves and question their validity?

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does tend to rhyme.

Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention… A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

Kiss slowly, laugh insanely, live truly, and forgive quickly.

Worrying is using your imagination to create something you don’t want.

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.

We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.

If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.

The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.

We must let go of the life we have planned so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly our whole life would change.

The mind is not a boomerang, if you throw it too far it will not come back.

If you always put a limit on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness; It is not excitement; It is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love”, which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

History is the propaganda of the victors.

History is the autobiography of a madman.

Maintaining order rather than correcting disorder is the ultimate principle of wisdom. To cure disease after it has appeared is like digging a well when one already feels thirsty or forging weapons after the war has already begun.

All violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.

If you’re brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello.

We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.

I will remember your small room, the feel of you, the light in the window, your records, your books, our morning coffee, our noons, our nights, our bodies spilled together, sleeping, the tiny flowing currents, immediate and forever. Your leg, my leg, your arm, my arm, your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again.

Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being not our dream, a human being with flaws.

The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.

The best way to know God is to love many things.

Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.

He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

Grief never ends…but it changes. It’s a passage, not a place to stay. Grief is not a sign of weakness, nor a lack of faith… it is the price of love.

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

Violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.

I have lived with several Zen masters – all of them cats.

The marriage isn’t there to make you happy. The marriage is there so you can make a life in which you can find happiness.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Soul work is not a high road. It’s a deep fall into unforgiving darkness that won’t let go until you find the song that sings you home.

Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.

The sweetest of all sounds is that of the voice of the woman we love.

Love is is not a strange mix of sex and sentiment. It’s really a wired-in, ancient survival code that’s designed to keep a few people that you really trust and that you can depend on close.

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

What have we to fear from love except what lacks foundation. Words can only carve the space we fill with expectation.

The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of out heart.

The desire of love is to give. The desire of lust is to get.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.

Tyranny is defined as that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

Don’t cling to a mistake just because you’ve spent a lot of time making it.

The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed

Normality is a paved road: it’s comfortable to walk on, but no flowers grow.

Intellect is the power tool of our seperateness. The intuitive, compassionate heart is the doorway to our unity.

We have art in order to not die from the truth.

Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

Tell me how you were loved and I’ll tell you how you make love.

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

You know what the issue is with the world? Everyone wants a magical solution to their problem, and everyone refuses to believe in magic.

Life is too important to be taken seriously.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Only that in you which is me can hear what I’m saying.

If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.

I cannot believe in a god that wants to be praised all the time.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

The single most important distinction in life is to distinguish between an opportunity to be seized and a temptation to be resisted.

There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this we are less prone to hate our enemies.

Bring me a wave separate from the ocean and I will show you a person separate from the universe.

Don’t confuse schooling for education. I didn’t go to Harvard but the people who work for me did.

Life is a near death experience.

Boredom: the desire for desires.

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

Everything in moderation, including moderation.

The only productive way to answer “what should I do now?” is to first tackle the question of “who should I become?

It’s thrilling to be extremely polite to rude strangers.

If we were meant to stay in one place, we’d have roots instead of feet.

Every interesting thing I’ve ever done, every important thing I’ve ever done, every beneficial thing I’ve ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality

This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

Everyone driving slower than you is an idiot and everyone driving faster than you is a maniac.