1. “There’s a reason you can learn from everything: you have basic wisdom, basic intelligence, and basic goodness.”

2.  “A further sign of health is that we don’t become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it’s time to stop struggling and look directly at what’s threatening us.”

3.  “Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us.”

4.  “Every moment is unique, unknown, completely fresh.”

5.  “Better to join in with humanity than to set ourselves apart.”

6.  “Enlightenment is a direct experience with reality.”

7.  “We can drop the fundamental hope that there is a better me who one day will emerge. We can’t just jump over ourselves as if we were not there.”

8.  “The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.”

9.  “…Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”

10.  “It isn’t the things that are happening to us that cause us to suffer, it’s what we say to ourselves about the things that are happening.”

11.  “Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away or become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.”

12.  “Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward.”

13.  “As we practice, we begin to know the difference between our fantasy and reality.”

14.  “Sometimes we find that we like our thoughts so much that we don’t want to let them go.”

15.  “The essence of practice is always the same: instead of falling prey to a chain reaction of revenge or self-hatred, we gradually learn to catch the emotional reaction and drop the story lines.”

16.  “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.”

17.  “If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.”

18.  “Feeling irritated, restless, afraid, and hopeless is a reminder to listen more carefully.”

19.  “We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves.”

20.  “When we scratch the wound and give into our addictions we do not allow the wound to heal.”

21.  “We don’t set out to save the world; we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people’s hearts.”

23.  “A thoroughly good relationship with ourselves results in being still, which doesn’t mean we don’t run and jump and dance about. It means there’s no compulsiveness. We don’t overwork, overeat, oversmoke, overseduce. In short, we begin to stop causing harm.”

24.  “Everything is material for the seed of happiness, if you look into it with inquisitiveness and curiosity. The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment. There always is the potential to create an environment of blame — or one that is conducive to loving-kindness.”

25.  “What’s encouraging about meditation is that even if we shut down, we can no longer shut down in ignorance. We see very clearly that we’re closing off. That in itself begins to illuminate the darkness of ignorance.”

26.  “Now is the only time. How we relate to it creates the future. In other words, if we’re going to be more cheerful in the future, it’s because of our aspiration and exertion to be cheerful in the present. What we do accumulates; the future is the result of what we do right now.”

27.  “When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it’s bottomless, that it doesn’t have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.”