Do you remember me telling you we are practicing non-verbal spells, Potter?

We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that's death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn't have any fresh air. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience.

The cause of most of man's unhappiness is sacrificing what he wants most for what he wants now.

To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?

The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.

"believe that this way of living, this focus on the present, the daily, the tangible, this intense concentration not on the news headlines but on the flowers growing in your own garden, the children growing in your own home, this way of living has the potential to open up the heavens, to yield a glittering handful of diamonds where a second ago there was coal. This way of living and noticing and building and crafting can crack through the movie sets and soundtracks that keep us waiting for our own life stories to begin, and set us free to observe the lives we have been creating all along without ever realizing it.

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

The real evidence for Jesus and Christianity is in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practicing Christians.

I guess as long as people think of me for different ages I'll trust their opinion. I remember noticing one year that Michelle Monaghan played 34 and 19 so I've kind of clung to that as my justification that I can be Jake Gyllenhaal's wife and a freshman in college in the same year.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality vulnerability mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

With existing technology we can enforce airport security without sacrificing our personal privacy.

Being a mother has been my greatest teacher and also the most self-sacrificing thing I've ever done.

One man practicing sportsmanship is far better than a hundred teaching it.

Questions have arisen about the policing of science. Who is responsible for the policing? My answer is: all of us.

It is sad to see a woman sacrificing the ties of the affections even to do good.

Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who with such a thought would not spring from bed eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?

Usually in romantic comedies you end up sacrificing a great deal of the complexity - you know just two attractive people and a good soundtrack.

Do you think that God will punish them for not practicing a religion which he did not reveal to them?

Music rhythms are mathematical patterns. When you hear a song and your body starts moving with it your body is doing math. The kids in their parents' garage practicing to be a band may not realize it but they're also practicing math.

Another thing that's quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you've written the next morning and you think you didn't get it quite right you can fix it.

I'm a morning person because I learned to write my novels while still practicing law. I would get to the office at 6:30 a.m. and write until other people arrived around 9. Now I still do that. I start at 6:30 or 7 and I'll write until 11 then take an hour off then work until about 2 p.m. By then my brain has had enough.

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.

When you make the sacrifice in marriage you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.