Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out.

Recommended reading: Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court.

Take everything that’s bright and beautiful in you and introduce it to the shadow side of yourself. Let your altruism meet your egotism, let your generosity meet your greed, let your joy meet your grief…. But when you are able to say, “I am all of the above, my shadow as well as my light,” the shadow’s power is put in service of the good.

Recommended reading: A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.

Two things can be true at once – even opposing truths… And you can hold those two truths in two hands, and walk forward.

Recommended reading: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar.

When we look deeply into a sheet of paper, we see that it’s full of everything in the cosmos: the sunshine, the trees, the clouds, the earth, the minerals, everything – except for one thing. It’s empty of one thing only: a separate self. The sheet of paper cannot be by itself alone. That is why the word inter-be can be more helpful than the word be. In fact, to be means to inter-be. The sheet of paper cannot be without the sunshine, cannot be without the forest. The sheet of paper has to inter-be with the sunshine, to inter-be with the forest.

Recommended reading: Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm.

The world of learning is so broad, and the human soul is so limited in power! We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.

Recommended reading: Maria Mitchell, Life, Letters, and Journals.

Although the mind resists it, the fact is that like me, you have a choice between having the life you want or the reasons why you can’t. You can luxuriate in joy and peace, or you can continually be burdened by that big black bag full of all the sorrowful incidents and accidents that happened to you in your childhood or last relationship. You can endure your wounds or you can enjoy your glory. You can live the life of a victim, burdened by the traumas of your past, or you can live the life of a hero, but you can’t do both. If you want to feel empowered, you need to make a courageous decision to create a sacred dream and practice courage.

Recommended reading: Courageous Dreaming: How Shamans Dream the World into Being.

No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thy friend’s. Or of thine own were: Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

Recommended reading: The Complete English Poems.

Throw away all opinions, all likes and dislikes, and only keep the mind that doesn’t know… Your before-thinking mind, my before-thinking mind, all people’s before-thinking minds are the same. This is your substance. Your substance, my substance, and the substance of the whole universe become one. So the tree, the mountain, the cloud, and you become one… The mind that becomes one with the universe is before thinking. Before thinking there are no words. “Same” and “different” are opposites words; they are from the mind that separates all things.

Recommended reading: Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teachings of Zen Master Seung Sahn.

The effort to see things without distortion takes something like courage, and this courage is essential… to look at everything as though… for the first time.

Recommended reading: Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs.