Here are some quotes I highlighted while reading:
“The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new.”
“What you really fear is loss of the known.”
“[Jesus] ran into trouble with people who were really convinced they were good.”:
“The lovely thing about Jesus was that he was so at home with sinners, because he understood that he wasn’t one bit better than they were.”
“All suffering is caused by misidentifying myself with something, whether than something is within me or outside me.”
“Anytime you have a negative feeling toward anyone, you’re living in an illusion.”
“We never feel grief when we lose something that we have allowed to be free, that we have never attempted to possess. Grief is a sign that I made my happiness depend on this thing or person, at least to some extent.”
“Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency.”
“Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality.”
“Someone once said, ‘The three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are first, returning love for hate; second, including the excluded, third, admitting that you are wrong.'”
“You know there are times like that when the Blessed Sacrament becomes more important than Jesus Christ. When worship becomes more important than love, when the Church becomes more important than life. When God becomes more important than the neighbor.”
“What you are aware of you are in control of. What you are not aware of is in control of you.”
“You don’t have to add anything in order to be happy; you’ve got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It’s only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings.”
“You don’t have to do anything to acquire happiness. The great Meister Eckhart said it very beautifully, ‘God is not attainted by a process of addition to anything in the soul, but by a process of subtraction.’ You don’t need to do anything to be free, you drop something. Then you’re free.”
“It’s not your actions, it’s your being that counts.”
“We see people and things not as they are, but as we are.”
“Part of waking up is that you live your life as you see fit. And understand: That is not selfish. The selfish thing is to demand that someone else life their life as YOU see fit. That’s selfish.“
“Awakening should be a surprise.”
“It’s only when you become love–in other words, when you have dropped your illusions and attachments–that you will “know” [that compassion can be very rude, can jolt you can roll up its sleeves and operate on you, can be soft, is all kinds of things].”
“That fanaticism of one sincere believer who thinks he knows causes more evil than the united efforts of two hundred rogues.”
“The highest knowledge of God is to know God as unknowable.”
“Happiness releases you from self. It is suffering and pain and misery and depression that tie you to the self.”
“Suffering points up an area in you where you have not yet grown, where you need to grow and be transformed and change. If you knew how to use that suffering, oh, how you would grow.”
“Negative feelings, every negative feeling, is useful for awareness, for understanding.”
“We always hate what we fear.”
“The moment you put things in a concept, they become static, dead.”
“Words are pointers, they’re not descriptions.”
“How sad if we pass through life and never see it with the eyes of a child.”
“When we start off in life, we look at reality with wonder, but it isn’t the intelligent wonder of the mystics; it’s the formless wonder of a child.”