Our relationship to reality and to our experience is all based upon the ideas in our mind that we're always trying to live up to.

What you're getting excited about is not A face, but a feminine face.

Freedom has no history.

We're making far too big a deal out of our sexual preferences. It's just another form of narcissism, and I think it can be a big problem and a tremendous obstacle.

I am already inherently full and complete as I am. Man doesn't need woman and woman doesn't need man in order to experience his or her inherent fullness.

It is not enough to be well-intentioned; one must strive to put those intentions into action in a capable way. One must consider the effect his actions will have on others. Looked at like this, to persist in ignorance is itself dishonorable.

We really have to be willing to find out who we are instead of rebelling for the equal rights that we've been denied, that we do deserve.

Most men are very attached to the idea of being male, and usually experience a lot of fear and insecurity around the idea of being a man. Most women are very identified with their gender, and also experience a tremendous amount of fear and insecurity.

When you come together with your other half, you immediately experience a sense of wholeness and completeness.

One of the most extraordinary things about being a spiritual teacher is the rare privilege of being able to look deeply into the very souls of many human beings at the same time.

I'm suspicious of any man or woman who approaches their own liberation with any kind of gender bias.

Hopefully, America will really get a sense of how justice can be served in this country. And hopefully, they'll forget the Simpson trial.

It is true that women tend to be more identified with their bodies because in this crazy world, both men and women measure women's value as human beings in relationship to their physical appearance.

The executive branch maneuvered this result deftly.

In my experience, men are not necessarily less sensitive or compassionate than women are, and women are not necessarily any less aggressive or competitive than men are - as a matter of fact, often they are more so!

I'm not convinced that what are traditionally considered to be male energies or qualities or female energies or qualities really have as much to do with gender as many people think they do.

When a human being becomes so still that they begin to lose awareness of their gender, and they are simply looking into that abyss where there is no notion of self whatsoever, the world disappears. And that's really the only place to go. It's the only place to remain.

We have to be willing to give up all the injustices of the past that did exist - and that do exist right now. When we become interested in liberation, we then become interested in that which transcends time.

There's nothing tantric about my particular view on life.

We have been very conditioned by the cultures that we come from and are usually very identified with the particular gender that we happen to be a member of.

To campaign against colonialism is like barking up a tree that has already been cut down.

The excitement that you were feeling about a special, unique path for yourself as a woman is all part of your identification with and attachment to being female. And that's ultimately all ego.

Men are recognizing that they have been forced to conform to a very narrow and rather two-dimensional picture of maleness and manhood that they have never had the freedom to question.

Our true nature is free of any and all notions of gender, of any notions of difference whatsoever.

Almost all the ideas we have about being a man or being a woman are so burdened with pain, anxiety, fear and self-doubt. For many of us, the confusion around this question is excruciating.

Our relationship to reality and to our experience is all based upon the ideas in our mind that we're always trying to live up to.

A lot of people in spiritual life use the awareness of difference, and the spiritual glorification of difference, as a justification to indulge in that which is ultimately unreal.

Everybody wants to get enlightened but nobody wants to change.

Were making far too big a deal out of our sexual preferences. Its just another form of narcissism and I think it can be a big problem and a tremendous obstacle.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

In my fifty years of experience and memory, I have seen the most amazing increase in the standard of living of a people ever achieved anywhere in the world. This is why I am so sure that our system of free competition and industrial development is sound and must be preserved.