We do not run government on whims of an individual, our progress is reforms driven, our reforms are policy driven and our policies are people driven.
Go on loving what is good, simple, and ordinary.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
the knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.
To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.
Think. . . of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it.
The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.
Don't fit in. Don't sit still. Don't ever try to do less than you are.
A candle is a living, flickering light. It can easily be blown out. As we watch a candle burn we see the wax diminish. It melts away - a symbol for life. [. . . ] Candles have long been central to worship. By lighting them we announce that we are entering into a different sense of time. Not the usual ticktock time of daily living, but sacred time, a timeless time.
Do not put all your goods in hollow ships.
All traditions are also full of meanness for the sake of meanness.