It has occasionally been remarked upon that it is as easy to overlook something large and obvious as it is to overlook something small and niggling, and that the large things one overlooks often cause...

Once the troublesome mind begins to compose speeches and dream up arguments, especially if these are clever, it will soon imagine it is doing important work. But if you can surpass those thoughts,...

Time - - when pursued like a bandit - - will behave like one; always remaining one country or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping out the back door of the...

As I turned the key and pushed open the front door, as I crossed the threshold, I thought how breathtaking, how fleeting, how precious was my ordinary day Now is now. Here is my treasure.

It's always today, Jim, and it's just going to get better and better, I said.

Man can be master of nothing while he fears death, but he who does not fear it possesses all. If there were no suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself. The hardest thing...

Why count the days when only one is enough for man to fully know happiness!

I have a room, which is in my brain, and it's very, very, very... untidy! There is stuff fallen everywhere. There are some very important ideas next to some very silly ones. There is a bottle of wine...

A magic realm of timelessness had been inserted into time, an intensity of newness and presentness, of the sort usually devoured by past and future. Suddenly, wonderfully, I found myself exempted from...

The sugar high of convenience is fleeting and the sting of missing out dulls rapidly, but the meaningful glow that comes from taking charge of what claims your time and attention is something that...

This is why clutter is dangerous. It's easy to be seduced by the small amounts of profit offered by the latest app or service, but then forget its cost in terms of the most important resource we...

Thoreau's obsession with calculation helps us move past the vague subjective sense that there are trade-offs inherent in digital clutter, and forces us instead to confront it more precisely. He asks...

Just before I doze off, I counsel myself grandiosely: Fuck concepts. Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and...

It might have helped us considerably to have been shown, perhaps through some simple exercises in elementary school, that we are not our thoughts, that we can watch them come and go and learn not to...

It helps to have a focus for your attention, an anchor line to tether you to the present moment and to guide you back when the mind wanders. The breath serves this purpose exceedingly well. It can be...

Above all, meditation is about letting the mind be as it is and knowing something about how it is in this moment. It's not about getting somewhere else, but about allowing yourself to be where you...

By the grace of this forgetting, we temporarily shelve our inherited ways of looking and see things as if for the first time

But to speed it along, he needs to know that pain will come. The knack is to not engage the pain, not hold on to it like a treasured thing, but to simply let it pass through and wait until it's gone....

I sense that he is not an alien persecuted and fleeing, but rather with an open chest, not thinking about anything, not yearning for anything, fully immersed in the peaceful, pure, near present. He is...

Without keeping up a merciless guard, day and night, the variety of forward opinions in this world could easily destroy one's sanity.

I have experienced life enough to realize that reality does not align with dreams, but its greatest joy now is to tell this reality that it does not need her and that her happiness is not linked to...

What we need to learn is always there before us, we just have to look around us with respect and attention in order to discover where God is leading us and which step we should take next.

When each day is the same as the next, it's because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day—the sunrises.

Worry divides the mind. The biblical word for worry {merimnao} is a compound of two Greek words, merizo {"to divide"} and nous {"the mind"}. Anxiety splits our energy between today's priorities and...

Kale pe a, repeated my friend. It is an ancient Tibetan farewell when a caravan sets out to climb the high peaks. It means - go slowly if you wish to return.

As far as he can tell, that's what Odo spends most of his time doing: being in time, like one sits by the river, watching the water go by. It's a lesson hard learned, just to sit there and be.

You cannot judge the importance of things by the noise they make.

Handle with care - everything - even the predators.

Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.

If you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can't get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the...