“Life is a banquet. And the tragedy is that most people are starving to death.”

“Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don't know it, are asleep. They're born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence."

“Even the best psychologists will tell you that, that people don't really want to be cured. What they want is relief; a cure is painful."

“The whole world is crazy. Certifiable lunatics! The only reason we're not locked up in an institution is that there are so many of us."

“When you renounce something, you're stuck to it forever. When you fight something, you're tied to it forever. As long as you're fighting it, you are giving it power. You give it as much power as you are using to fight it."

“It’s not that we fear the unknown. You cannot fear something that you do not know. Nobody is afraid of the unknown. What you really fear is the loss of the known. That's what you fear."

“I dare not stop to think, because if I did, I wouldn’t know how to get started again.”

“Are you enlightened?”

“How would I know?”

“The trouble with people is that they're busy fixing things they don't even understand. We're always fixing things, aren't we? It never strikes us that things don't need to be fixed. They really don't. This is a great illumination. They need to be understood. If you understood them, they'd change."

“As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life. But life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to the mind.

Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made. Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.“

“Eternity is right now.”

"Many wrongly assume that not having negative feelings like anger and resentment and hate means that you do nothing about a situation. Oh no, oh no! You are not affected emotionally but you spring into action."

“We never feel grief when we lose something that we have allowed to be free, that we have never attempted to possess."

“There’s only one reason why you're not experiencing bliss at this present moment, and it's because you're thinking or focusing on what you don't have. Otherwise, you would be experiencing bliss."

“There’s not a single evil in the world that you cannot trace to fear. Not one."

“When I’m listening to you, it's infinitely more important for me to listen to me than to listen to you. Of course, it's important to listen to you, but it's more important that I listen to me. Otherwise, I won't be hearing you. Or I'll be distorting everything you say. I'll be coming at you from my own conditioning."

“I got a pretty good education. It took me years to get over it.”

“Negative feelings are in you. No person on earth has the power to make you unhappy. There is no event on earth that has the power to disturb you or hurt you. No event, condition, situation, or person. Nobody told you this; they told you the opposite. That's why you're in the mess that you're in right now. That is why you're asleep. They never told you this. But it's self-evident."

“When you change, everything changes.”

“I want to tell you exactly how you're expected to be and how you're expected to behave, and you'd better behave as I have decided or I shall punish myself by having negative feelings. Remember what I told you: everybody's a lunatic."

“Awakening should be a surprise. When you don't expect something to happen and it happens, you feel surprise. When Webster's wife caught him kissing the maid, she told him she was very surprised. Now, Webster was a stickler for using words accurately (understandably, since he wrote a dictionary), so he answered her, 'No, my dear, I am surprised. You are astonished!'"

"Nobody was mean to you. Somebody was mean to what he or she thought was you, but not to you. Nobody ever rejects you; they're only rejecting what they think you are.

But that cuts both ways. Nobody ever accepts you either. Until people come awake, they are simply accepting or rejecting their image of you. They've fashioned an image of you, and they're rejecting or accepting that.

See how devastating it is to go deeply into that. It's a bit too liberating. But how easy it is to love people when you understand this. How easy it is to love everyone when you don't identify with what they imagine you are or they are. It becomes easy to love them, to love everybody."

“One cannot say anything about the awakened state; one can only talk about the sleeping state. One hints at the awakened state. One cannot say anything about happiness. Happiness cannot be defined. What can be defined is misery. Drop unhappiness and you will know. Love cannot be defined; unlove can. Drop unlove, drop fear, and you will know. We want to find out what the awakened person is like. But you'll know only when you get there."

“No theory adequately covers reality. So I can speak to you, not of the truth, but of obstacles to the truth. Those I can describe. I cannot describe the truth. No one can.

All I can do is give you a description of your falsehoods, so that you can drop them. All I can do for you is challenge your beliefs and the belief system that makes you unhappy. All I can do for you is help you to unlearn.

That's what learning is all about where spirituality is concerned: unlearning, unlearning almost everything you've been taught. A willingness to unlearn, to listen."

“The fact is that you're surrounded by God and you don't see God, because you 'know' about God. The final barrier to the vision of God is your God concept. You miss God because you think you know."

“The poor little fish in the ocean says, 'Excuse me, I'm looking for the ocean. Can you tell me where I can find it?'"

“Happiness releases you from self. It is suffering and pain and misery and depression that tie you to the self. Look how conscious you are of your tooth when you have a toothache. When you don't have a toothache, you're not even aware you have a tooth, or that you have a head, for that matter, when you don't have a headache. But it's so different when you have a splitting headache.

So it's quite false, quite erroneous, to think that the way to deny the self is to cause pain to the self, to go in for abnegation, mortification, as these were traditionally understood. To deny the self, to die to it, to lose it, is to understand its true nature. When you do that, it will disappear; it will vanish."

“I am He who is; you are she who is not.”

“You thought you were the dancer; you now experience yourself as the dance.”

“Who says that worrying doesn’t help? It certainly does help. Every time I worry about something, it doesn’t happen!”

“Do not suppress desire, because then you would become lifeless. You'd be without energy and that would be terrible. Desire in the healthy sense of the word is energy, and the more energy we have, the better. But don't suppress desire, understand it.

Understand it. Don't seek to fulfill desire so much as to understand desire. And don't just renounce the objects of your desire, understand them; see them in their true light. See them for what they are really worth.

Because if you just suppress your desire, and you attempt to renounce the object of your desire, you are likely to be tied to it.

Whereas if you look at it and see it for what it is really worth, if you understand how you are preparing the grounds for misery and disappointment and depression, your desire will then be transformed into what I call a preference. When you go through life with preferences but don't let your happiness depend on any one of them, then you're awake."

“The one who would be constant in happiness must frequently change.”

“Until somebody told you you wouldn’t be happy unless you were loved, you were perfectly happy.”

“You become happy by contact with reality. That's what brings happiness, a moment-by-moment contact with reality. That's where you'll find God; that's where you'll find happiness. But most people are not ready to hear that."

“Why bother about tomorrow? Is there a life after death? Will I survive after death? Why bother about tomorrow? Get into today."

“Live in the present moment. This is one of the things you will notice happening to you as you come awake. You find yourself living in the present, tasting every moment as you live it. Another fairly good sign is when you hear the symphony one note after the other without wanting to stop it."

“The concept always misses or omits something extremely important, something precious that is only found in reality, which is concrete uniqueness. The great Krishnamurti put it so well when he said, 'The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.'"

"If you don't look at things through your concepts, you'll never be bored. Every single thing is unique."

“Happiness is not something you acquire; love is not something you produce; love is not something that you have; love is something that has you. You do not have the wind, the stars, and the rain. You don’t possess these things; you surrender to them.”

“My country was one country once upon a time; it's four now. If we don't watch out it might be six. Then we'll have six flags, six armies. That's why you'll never catch me saluting a flag. I abhor all national flags because they are idols. What are we saluting? I salute humanity, not a flag with an army around it."

“How does one cope with evil? Not by fighting it but by understanding it. In understanding it, it disappears. How does one cope with darkness? Not with one's fist. You don't chase darkness out of the room with a broom, you turn on a light."

“I’m satisfied with very little and I enjoy it intensely. When you have enjoyed something intensely, you need very little."

“There is yet another illusion, that it is important to be respectable, to be loved and appreciated, to be important. Many say we have a natural urge to be loved and appreciated, to belong. That's false. Drop this illusion and you will find happiness. We have a natural urge to be free, a natural urge to love, but not to be loved."

“Nourish yourself on wholesome food, good wholesome food. I'm not talking about actual food, I'm talking about sunsets, about nature, about a good movie, about a good book, about enjoyable work, about good company, and hopefully you will break your addictions to those other feelings.

What kind of feeling comes upon you when you're in touch with nature, or when you're absorbed in work that you love? Or when you're really conversing with someone whose company you enjoy in openness and intimacy without clinging? What kind of feelings do you have?

Compare those feelings with the feelings you have when you win an argument, or when you win a race, or when you become popular, or when everybody's applauding you. The latter feelings I call worldly feelings; the former feelings I call soul feelings.

Lots of people gain the world and lose their soul. Lots of people live empty, soulless lives because they're feeding themselves on popularity, appreciation, and praise, on 'I'm O.K., you're O.K.,' look at me, attend to me, support me, value me, on being the boss, on having power, on winning the race.

Do you feed yourself on that? If you do, you're dead. You've lost your soul. Feed yourself on other, more nourishing material. Then you'll see the transformation. I've given you a whole program for life, haven't I?"

“How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god?”

“Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all, openness - an act of trust in the unknown.”

“Unless one is able to live fully in the present, the future is a hoax. There is no point whatever in making plans for a future which you will never be able to enjoy. When your plans mature, you will still be living for some other future beyond. You will never, never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, “Now, I’ve arrived!”

“Everything is uncertain. I’ve searched for over forty years as a monk and this is all I could find. That, and patient endurance.”

“Escaping from suffering means knowing the way out of suffering; it doesn't mean running away from wherever suffering arises. By doing that you just carry your suffering with you."

“If there’s a flood, let it only affect your house; don’t let it flood your mind. If there’s a fire, don’t let it burn your heart.”

“The call to stillness comes quietly. The modern world does not.”

“You can’t escape - with your body - problems that exist in your mind and soul.”

“How different would the world look if people spent as much time listening to their conscience as they did to chattering broadcasts? If they could respond to the calls of their convictions as they answer the dings and rings of technology in their pockets?”

“The individual problem is the world problem. It is what we are as individuals that create society, society being the relationship between ourselves and others. I am speaking – and please believe it – as one individual to another, so that together we may understand the many problems that confront us.

I am not establishing myself as an authority to tell you what to do because I do not believe in authority in spiritual matters. All authority is evil, and all sense of authority must cease, especially if we would find out what is God, what is truth, whether there is something beyond the mere measure of the mind. That is why it is very important for the individual to understand himself.”

“After all, I can understand violence only when, with my whole mind, I give complete attention to the problem. And the moment I am wholly concerned with violence and the understanding of violence, what significance has the ideal of nonviolence?

It seems to me that the pursuit of the ideal is an evasion, a postponement. If I am to understand violence, I must give my whole mind to it and not allow myself to be distracted by the ideal of nonviolence.”

“To understand the immeasurable, the mind must be extraordinarily quiet, still; but if I think I am going to achieve stillness at some future date, I have destroyed the possibility of stillness. It is now or never. That is a very difficult thing to understand because we are all thinking of heaven in terms of time.”

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

#1: “Is my view of reality accurate? How would I be able to know?”

#2: "What do I really fear? Is it a surface fear, or does it point to a deeper fear of which I may be unaware?"

#3: "What am I trying to possess by holding on to my concepts and ideas about how life should be? Am I able to let them go and yet still feel connected to life?"

#4: “Is life actually hard? Or am I overcomplicating things by making it more difficult for myself? What if life could be easy?”

#5: “What do I already have to be grateful for that I’m forgetting about right now? How fantastically wealthy am I already?”

#6: “Is enlightenment really a place - or even a state of mind - that I can ever reach? How would I ever know that I had attained it? Wouldn’t becoming aware of being enlightened mean that I wasn’t actually enlightened?!”

#7: "Have I been habitually responding with anger and defensiveness in situations that require more compassionate understanding instead?”

#8: “What’s the rush? Why am I in such a hurry to get someplace besides where I am right now, when here and now is all that will ever exist and I’ve already arrived?”

#9: "When am I going to stop striving and grasping for things I think are lacking in my life, and instead cultivate gratitude for the blessings which arrive in my life each and every day without fail?”

#10: "What if I’m already completely perfect the way I am, and could use a little improvement?”

"Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers."

“When you renounce something, you're stuck to it forever. When you fight something, you're tied to it forever. As long as you're fighting it, you are giving it power. You give it as much power as you are using to fight it."

“The only way someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas. If you’re ready to listen and if you’re ready to be challenged, there’s one thing that you can do, but no one can help you.

What is this most important thing of all? It’s called self-observation. No one can help you there. No one can give you a method. No one can show you a technique. The moment you pick up a technique, you’re programmed again.

But self-observation—watching yourself—is important. It is not the same as self-absorption. Self-absorption is self-preoccupation, where you’re concerned about yourself, worried about yourself. I’m talking about self-observation.

What’s that? It means to watch everything in you and around you as far as possible and watch it as if it were happening to someone else. What does that last sentence mean? It means that you do not personalize what is happening to you. It means that you look at things as if you have no connection with them whatsoever.”

"The path to success is to take massive, determined action.”