Our life is the manifestation of our minds.

Our entire lives are governed by a voice in our heads. This voice is engaged in a ceaseless stream of thinking—most of it negative, repetitive, and self-referential.

The ego is never satisfied. No matter how much stuff we buy, no matter how many arguments we win or delicious meals we consume, the ego never feels complete.

The ego thrives on drama. It keeps our old resentments and grievances alive through compulsive thought.

“When you have one foot in the future and the other in the past, you piss on the present.”

As best I could understand it, the Buddha’s main thesis was that in a world where everything is constantly changing, we suffer because we cling to things that won’t last.

We suffer because we get attached to people and possessions that ultimately evaporate.

The route to true happiness was to achieve a visceral understanding of impermanence, which would take you off the emotional roller coaster and allow you to see your dramas and desires through a wider lens.

This is where the Buddhists diverged quite dramatically from self-help: They had an actual, practical program. It wasn’t expensive gimcrackery. No spendy seminars, no credit cards required. It was totally free.

In a nutshell, mindfulness is the ability to recognize what is happening in your mind right now—anger, jealousy, sadness, the pain of a stubbed toe, whatever—without getting carried away by it.

We can do more than just think; we also have the power simply to be aware of things—without judgment, without the ego. This is not to denigrate thinking, just to say that thinking without awareness can be a harsh master.

Picture the mind like a waterfall, they said: the water is the torrent of thoughts and emotions; mindfulness is the space behind the waterfall.

RAIN. R: recognize A: allow I: investigate N: non-identification

Bingo: respond not react.

Sam once said in his speech to the angry, befuddled atheists, learn how to be happy “before anything happens.” This happiness is self-generated, not contingent on exogenous forces; it’s the opposite of “suffering.”

The real superpower of meditation is not just to manage your ego more mindfully but to see that the ego itself has no actual substance. Close your eyes and look for it, and you won’t find any “self” you can put your finger on.

... ask yourself the following question: ‘Is this useful’?

The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness.

The brain, it turns out, is constantly changing in response to experience. It’s possible to sculpt your brain through meditation just as you build and tone your body through exercise—to grow your gray matter the way doing curls grows your bicep.

The brain, the organ of experience, through which our entire lives are led, can be trained. Happiness is a skill.

Studies showed that the best way to engineer an epiphany was to work hard, focus, research, and think about a problem—and then let go. Do something else.

Mindfulness, I had come to believe, could, in fact, change the world.

“Practice of compassion is ultimately benefit to you. So I usually describe: we are selfish, but be wise selfish rather than foolish selfish.”

This clunky phrase “nonattachment to results” was my long-sought Holy Grail, the middle path, the marriage of “the price of security” and “the wisdom of insecurity.”

1. Don’t Be a Jerk 2. When Necessary, Hide the Zen 3. Meditate 4. The Price of Security Is Insecurity—Until It’s Not Useful 5. Equanimity Is Not the Enemy of Creativity 6. Don’t Force It 7. Humility Prevents Humiliation 8. Go Easy with the Internal Cattle Prod 9. Nonattachment to Results 10. What Matters Most?

Nonattachment to results + self compassion = a supple relentlessness that is hard to match. Push hard, play to win, but don’t assume the fetal position if things don’t go your way.

“Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel.”

I'm not a huge fan of scary movies, but I love doing them because your character arc gets condensed, and everything is elevated, and so you kind of have this amazing opportunity to go in many different places.

Usually, one day in a century rises above the others as an accepted turning point or historic milestone. It becomes the climactic day, or 'the day,' of that century.

On the other hand the Bible contains much that is relevant today like Noah taking 40 days to find a place to park.

We went through an era of big dance records, an era of hip-hop being the biggest thing on the planet. The people who really break through are the people who are not afraid to express themselves in how they feel.

What interests me most is when a work of art is no longer just an object, but also touches reality and life.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

I was a rebellious adolescent. It was the '60s. Everyone was rebellious. I hated high school.

In a sense it's a lot crazier when you're on the road and it's a lot less stable, but it's actually really healthy for me because it keeps me from isolating, which I tend to do a lot.

One of the only TV shows that I really love is 'Twin Peaks.' Kyle McLachlan plays Agent Dale Cooper, and I love Dale Cooper, so I'm in love with Kyle McLachlan. He could be my dad, so it's really weird.

I've been extremely lucky in my career, in terms of artists and colorists I've been able to work with, and I think 'Helheim' is a perfect example of that look playing out perfectly.

The purpose of a business is to create customers.

XL is a world class brand with very successful insurance, reinsurance and life reinsurance businesses and I look forward to helping it realize its full potential.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

We need a reason to speak but none to keep silent.

In order to win the war on terrorism, we have to win the war of information. Information is so very, very valuable. This is an important tool in gathering up information.

If your government had given me a thousandth of the sum it spent to depose me, I could have won that war.

Although designers continue to dream of 'transparency' - technologies that just do their job without making their presence felt - both creators and audiences actually like technologies with 'personality.'

Becoming the best that you can be.

There is a real problem in terms of the refugee flow, the ability of ISIS to infiltrate those refugee flows, our inability to track them.

I became a co-chair of the Congressional Study Group from Germany several years ago with the expressed purpose of helping increase aid to Holocaust survivors.

I do like to write nasty songs. It's a useful weapon to have, and it's cathartic as well, because I create art out of anger, something positive out of something negative.

If you get to bring a little movie on the festival circuit, it's a nice experience because you get to see it with an audience. People who go to festivals to watch films are usually a little more eager to enjoy them. It's exciting because it's like you're going to the film's opening night at every festival.