The idea that you make an experience that requires a conversation in a public place is training for the fact that culture is collective.
Understand this if nothing else: spiritual freedom and oneness with the Tao are not randomly bestowed gifts, but the rewards of conscious self-transformation and self-evolution.
Watch your thoughts, they become words. Watch your words, they become actions. Watch your actions, they become habit.
Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.
If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself, if you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.
Success is as dangerous as failure. Hope is as hollow as fear. What does it mean that success is a dangerous as failure? Whether you go up the ladder or down it, you position is shaky. When you stand with your two feet on the ground, you will always keep your balance. What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear? Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. When we don't see the self as self, what do we have to fear? See the world as your self. Have faith in the way things are. Love the world as your self; then you can care for all things.
Those who know do not talk. Those who talk do not know.
Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.
My wife [Tina Brown] co-founded the Daily Beast, so I have no hostility to the web or Internet. A number of print friends of mine regard it as the worst thing that's ever happened, but I don't.
So remember, my meaning of discipline is not that of any Ten Commandments. . . Your discipline has to come from your very heart, it has to be your own-and there is a great difference. When somebody else gives you the discipline, it can never fit you; it will be like wearing somebody else's clothes. Either they will be too loose or too tight, and you will always feel a little bit silly in them.
Most of the homeschooled children I know have about the same amount of after-school peer time as the rest of the population but, obviously, without that school day together, they do spend less time with their peers. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is still open to debate.