... {W}e should be mucking about all the time, because mucking about is enjoying life for its own sake, now, and not in preparation for an imaginary future. It's obvious that the mirth - filled man,...

Everything is beautiful. We have all this beauty in the world and all we have to do is reach out and touch it, it is all there and all ours for the taking. - Cecilia to Henry Chinaski

The incident emphasizes once more that beauty is something to be found, rather than passively encountered, that it requires us to pick up on certain details, to identify the whiteness of a cotton...

Insomnia is his mind's revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours.

From a clearer perspective, I can now see how my presence on that dock that resulted in my brother's rescue was instrumental in giving me the information and the confidence to become a teacher and...

Remove all unloving thoughts from your mind, and practice kindness in all of your thoughts, words, and actions. Cultivate

Whether it's your health, wealth, happiness, or any other element of your entire life experience, it is essential to keep in mind the importance of the movement of your attention. You must be...

to remind ourselves of our intention, which is to get higher and

While your intellect went to prep school, your unconscious remained in the jungle where it is still swinging in the trees! Looking

In contrast, nonattachment allows full participation in life without trying to control outcomes.

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...

Life, if you keep chasing it so hard, will drive you to death. Time—when pursued like a bandit—will behave like one; always remaining one country or one room ahead of you, changing its name and...

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...

To bask in the present, care nothing about the future, and forget the past.

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....