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

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.

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’?

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.”

I'd never been a teacher before, and here I was starting my first day with these eager students. There was a shortage of teachers, and they had been without a math teacher for six months. They were so excited to learn math.

I have a very strict gun control policy if theres a gun around I want to be in control of it.

The worm of paranoia begins to eat into even the hardest adversary.

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.

During my solitude, conflicting thoughts increased; but much exercise of soul had the effect of causing the scriptures to gain complete ascendancy over me.

I'm a big believer of daylight in the studio.

We all have different desires and needs, but if we don't discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled.

With all this dolling up and featuring of the news, it's getter harder and harder just to get the facts of the story.

Some people are probably scratching their heads and saying, How did that happen? That's because some of the media didn't give the public the full story.

When we talk about the healthcare crisis in America we've got to also be talking about the dental crisis and how to address it.

We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women's voices are heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored.

The manager cannot share his power with division superintendent or foreman or workman, but he can give them opportunities for developing their power.

The first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

Descendants of New England pioneers are proud of their ancestry and glad to proclaim the fact that so far as the United States are concerned, New England is in deed the cradle of religious liberty.

What Must-See T.V. was all about was one network, one night, for one decade. And a third of the country would come and watch Must-See T.V. And you didn't dare go to work the next day, because if you hadn't watched, you would be left out of the conversation, that water-cooler conversation.

To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.

The underlying principles of strategy are enduring, regardless of technology or the pace of change.

Bin Laden, who was in his country, attacked and damaged our Pentagon, and killed our soldiers right out here at the Pentagon. But his pentagon no longer exists. It is rubble.

It's fun for me to play people that are just kind of odd.

In a man-to-man fight, the winner is he who has one more round in his magazine.

I suppose when I was writing 'V for Vendetta' I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: 'Wouldn't it be great if these ideas actually made an impact?' So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world... It's peculiar.

I have tried to help build a framework that recaptures the First Amendment as a principle to empower all Americans, politically and personally, through access to plentiful, diverse communications spaces.