Rembrandt painted portraits, The Karate Kid painted fences, and I paint my toenails. But I’m not a snob, I still consider those other two guys to be artists.
We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods in...
Sometimes people will hear you and be able to change their behavior, but often their behavior has more to do with their own need for approval than with your need for support. No matter what their response, you need to be firm and hold your ground. At...
Karma is often wrongly confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature.....
From the ages of 8-18, me and my family moved around a lot. Mostly we would just stretch, but occasionally one of us would actually get up to go to the fridge.
I don’t shower because water is the most corrosive element. Ever seen what it does to rock? I want a chiseled body, but I don’t want it to look like the Grand Canyon.
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a ...
The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the...
That's my point: if you own thirty or more books, or you are reading any book at this moment, you may protest all you want, but you were born on the wrong continent.
The ones that change...it’s not that going actually changed them its that they didn’t have something better waiting for them when they got back. They changed because its who they wanted to be. Not everyone is lucky enough to have the better half ...
We live in an age fit for heroes. No time has ever offered such perils or prizes. Man can provide a full life for humanity – or he can destroy himself with the problems he has created. The test of this century will be whether man confuses the growt...
If I were facing a firing squad, I’d ask them to hold on just one second, because I have a wedgie and it is very uncomfortable. Let me adjust myself, and then you can shoot me.
In a depression, attendance to sporting events goes down, while the percentage of people fornicating goes up, because sex is free. I know, some of you are probably thinking, Free! Where do I find those hookers?!
To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the int...
On the subject of how to make friends, I would give you some tips, but I just don’t have any. Oh, I have plenty of tips, but I don’t have any friends.
Only a friend or a giraffe would stick his neck out for you. But only a giraffe would eat all the leaves off your tree so he could peek in your second story bedroom window.
Great revelations of nature, of course, never fail to impress in one way or another, and I was no stranger to moods of the kind. Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own. But all th...
People always ask me if I’m into sports, and I say, “Well, isn’t writing a sport? If you’re doing it right, and you have a deadline, you should be sweating.
I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I'm sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual - we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I'm sure th...
My wife told me she’d meet me at the mall, and I said, “Don’t be silly. We’ve already met. What, do you think I’d marry a stranger?
Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity righ...
