Buddha

Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts.

The whole secret of existence is to have no fear.

Nothing ever exists entirely alone. Everything is in relation to everything else.

One who conquers himself is greater than another who conquers a thousand times a thousand on the battlefield.

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.

What you possess, you lose.

[On religion:] Wasn’t it invented by man for a kind of solace? It’s as though he had said, ‘I’ll make me a nice comfortable garment to shut out the heat and the cold,’ and then it ends by becoming a strait-jacket.

I’m a bit superstitious about certain things, like what shoes to wear. If I wear the wrong shoes, the whole day may go wrong. Or if I don’t get to the bottom of the stairs before the door closes – stupid little things like that. Then I also have all the normal ones, like don’t walking under ladders and so on.

God is a loving god.

A follower of the way has neither form nor shape, neither root nor trunk; nor dwelling place; like a fish leaping in the water.

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.

Adam was the luckiest man; he had no mother-in-law.

Zen has no business with ideas.

As I reminded my girls, these aren’t problems. These are very high class problems. Because of where Barack and I come from, we just couldn’t sympathize with their… It was like, ‘Girl, you live in the White House. You do not get to complain about this.

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.

Don’t rush anything. When the time is right, it’ll happen.

Right now, it’s like this.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

Buddha means awareness, the awareness of body and mind that prevents evil from arising in either.