Mingyur Rinpoche

Use every distraction as an object of meditation and they cease to be distractions.

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not an example.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

He who would be a man must therefore be a non-conformist.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder – in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.

Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and need not to be flattered, but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them.

One thing you learn: if you want to reveal yourself, you also have to know where to stop.

Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

We must set up a strong present tense against all rumors of wrath, past and to come.