The ego will endure the worst agonies of neurotic misery rather than consent to one minute of diminishment of its sense of importance.

Each of us, as we journey through life, has the opportunity to find and to give his or her unique gift. Whether this gift is quiet or small in the eyes of the world does not matter at all-not at all it is through the finding and the giving that we may come to know the joy that lies at the center of both the dark times and the light.

Unless a man or woman has experienced the darkness of the soul he or she can know nothing of that transforming laughter without which no hint of the ultimate reality of the opposites can be faintly intuited.

We hurry through the so-called boring things in order to attend to that which we deem more important, interesting. Perhaps the final freedom will be a recognition that every thing in every moment is 'essential' and that nothing at all is 'important.'

The only valid cure for any kind of depression is the acceptance of real suffering. To climb out of it any other way is simply laying the foundation for the next depression.

Wisdom consists in doing the next thing that you have to do, doing it with your whole heart and finding delight in it — and the delight is the sense of the sacred.

The coming to consciousness is not a discovery of some new thing it is a long and painful return to that which has always been.