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.

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.

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’?

Our life is the manifestation of our minds.

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.”

What is called for is dignity. We need to set an example.

I have a mess in my head sometimes, and there's something very satisfying about putting it into words. Certainly it's not something that you're in charge of, necessarily, but writing about it, putting it into your words, can be a very powerful experience.

It would be hard to exaggerate Ernest Hemingway's influence over American literature, but his influence on our lives is probably larger still.

The U.S. military has done a phenomenal job of creating these facilities almost over-night and dealing with these sworn enemies of America with more respect and dignity than they ever would have considered according our officers had they captured any.

Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.

To delay is injustice.

I’m scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life the way I feel when I’m with you.

Beauty is produced by the pleasing appearance and good taste of the whole, and by the dimensions of all the parts being duly proportioned to each other.

I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.

Maybe I was born to be a merchant, maybe it was fate. I don't know about that. But I know this for sure: I loved retail from the very beginning.

Before 1972, no actors got residuals. They just got paid. No residuals.

In my latter years I've decided that there's too much to keep track of when you go into the lying game. That becomes stressful and it's not for me anymore.

The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.

No one is laughable who laughs at himself.

Don't lie - when you are 105 years of age - on your deathbed, thinking, 'I should have done a few things!' I would like to think I tried as much as I could.

Scrutiny has never scared me because I have had detractors all my life.

Just as white light consists of colored rays, so reverence for life contains all the components of ethics: love, kindliness, sympathy, empathy, peacefulness and power to forgive.

When the idle poor become the idle rich, you'll never know just who is who, or which is which.

I'm such a hater, and will hate on anything.

Violence in film and television is an ongoing conversation, and I like eavesdropping on it, but I'm never sure what my opinion is. I like watching creative violence, but I don't know.

We can't stop a baby in Africa from starving to death... but we can afford enough technology and weaponry to blow the world up a million times over.

I have yet to take capital losses on any company. Then again, it's still early.