The Buddha’s dharma didn’t teach peace and relaxation it taught awakening—often rude awakening.

There’s no path to liberation that doesn’t pass through the shadow.

There has been a ton of excellent music in this period (along with a few misses), evoking scenes like a bar-room brawl at a border-town dive, a washed-up singer in a smoky lounge, and the scenes of violence in Bob Dylan latter-day music videos.I think the ethos of this period is best summed up in the 2001 song Summer Days.

[Bob] Dylan would cut out phrases from magazines and then paste them together.

We in the Jewish community are comparatively lucky. All of traditions have anti-gay pieces but the Jewish tradition doesn't have as many anti-sexuality and anti-body teachings. It's a lot easier to fit affirmation of sexuality and gender.

[Bob] Dylan, like Johnny Cash and only a handful of others, simultaneously embodies the American dream and the harsh wake-up call that comes after it.

[Bob] Dylan thus deserves the Nobel Prize, not just for new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition, as the Nobel committee aptly described his work, but also for embodying the contradictions within it.

Religion is commodified the educational system is a sham and yet,[Bob] Dylan wonders, everyone has to stand naked sometime.

[Bob] Dylan is a contemporary Don Quixote, at once besotted by the promise of America and yet also undermining it.

[Bob Dylan] is a preacher but also a sinner a poet but also a pitchman authentic all-American but also invented persona.

People should support equality because of their religion not despite it. These are the values that openness, inclusion, diversity promote. And they're directly opposed to the kind of enforced closet of certain interpretations of religion.

Sometimes, sitting there on the cushion failing to watch your breath, it can feel like you’re the only weirdo weird enough to be wasting your time in this way. But you’re not! There are generations of weirdos, monasteries full of them, and we have the benefit of their accumulated wisdom.

In late [Bob] Dylan, music is the key to immortality, even though the summer days are long gone.

[Bob] Dylan's many quotations from classic American roots music (that song is from an album aptly titled Love and Theft) join the aging poet to a tradition that preceded him and hopefully will outlive him as well.

I suspect many readers might associate [Bob Dylan] with one of the shortest phases of his career, the time from 1963 to '65 when he wrote his most famous protest songs, like Blowin' in the Wind and The Times They Are a-Changin.'

What a miracle, that all we have to do to be beautifully loving creatures is just relax and allow.

Weirdly, by the way,[Bob] Dylan also managed to write several beautiful love songs, like To Make You Feel My Love (covered by Adele, Garth Brooks, Billy Joel, and who knows who else) and Most of the Time. Go figure.