“A man is literally what he thinks”. This might be a shocking statement, but everything is a state of mind.

The subconscious mind favors thoughts inspired by emotional feelings. It also gives preference to dominating thoughts.

The past is no more, the future is not yet. “Now” includes the balance of being here, experiencing, involvement, phenomenon, awareness.

To understand and live now, there must be dying to everything of yesterday. Die continually to every gained experience – be in a state of choiceless awareness of what is.

When you are awake, you must be fully awake and conscious about everything. This is a wonderful exercise.

Suffering itself does less afflict the senses than the anticipation of suffering.

A concentrated mind is not an attentive mind, but a mind that is in a state of awareness can concentrate. Awareness is never exclusive, it includes everything.

Concentration is a narrowing down of the mind – but we are concerned with the total process of living, and to concentrate exclusively on any particular aspect of life, belittles life.

All thought is partial, is can never be total. Thought is the response of memory, and memory is always partial, because memory is the result of experience; so thought is the reaction of a mind which is conditioned by experience.

The mind must be wide open in order to function freely in thought. For a limited mind cannot think freely.

To bring the mind into sharp focus and to make it alert so that it can immediately intuit truth, which is everywhere, the mind must be emancipated from old habits, prejudices, restrictive thought process, and even ordinary thought itself.

To be on the alert means to be deadly serious; to be deadly serious means to be sincere to oneself, and it is sincerity that finally leads to the Way.

Every man is what he is because of the dominating thoughts which he permits to occupy his mind.

Sincere thought means thought of concentration (quiet awareness). The thought of a distracted mind cannot be sincere.

Mans’s mind and his behavior are one, his inner thought and outer expression cannot contradict each other. Therefore a man should set up his right principle, and this right mind (principle) will influence his action.

Don’t think – feel. Feeling exists here and now when not interrupted and dissected by ideas or concepts.

Just watch choicelessly and in the watching lies the wonder. It is not an ideal, an end to be desired. The watching is a state of “being” already, not a state of “becoming”.

Anxiety is the gap between the “now” and the “then”. SO if you are in the “now”, you can’t be anxious, because your excitement flows immediately into ongoing spontaneous activity.

One great cause of failure is lack on concentration.

The moment we stop analyzing and let go, we can start really seeing, feeling – as one whole.

There is no need to exert oneself in special cultivation outside the daily round of living.

To understand your fear is the beginning of really seeing.

The present? Well, think of it in terms of challenges and opportunities, and the rewards available for the application of your talents and energies.

As for the future, that is a time and a place where every worthy ambition you posses is within your grasp.

In a time when everything goes well, my mind is pampered with enjoyment, possessiveness, etc. Only in times of adversity, privation, or mishap, does my mind function and think properly of my state. This close examination of self strengthens my mind and leads me to understand and be understood.

Here is natural instinct, and there is control. You are to combine the two in harmony. If you have one to the extreme you will be very unscientific; if you have another to the extreme, you become a mechanical man, no longer human being.

So it is a successful combination of both. It is not pure naturalness, or pure unnaturalness. The ideal is unnatural naturalness or natural unnaturalness.

When my tutor assisted me in choosing my courses, he advised me to take up philosophy because of my inquisitiveness. He said, “philosophy will tell you what man lives for”.

Philosophy is itself the disease for which it pretends to be the cure: the wise man does not pursue wisdom but lives his life, and therein precisely does his wisdom lie.

Just as the maintaining of good health may require the taking of unpleasant medicine, so the condition of being able to do the things we enjoy often requires the performance of a few we don’t.

It is the ego that stands rigidly against things coming from the outside, and it is this “ego rigidity” that makes it impossible for us to accept everything that confronts us.

One should get rid of this obtruding self – or ego-consciousness – and apply himself to the work to be done as if nothing particular were taking place at the moment.

Logic’s central problem is the distinction between correct and incorrect argument.

Emotions – the most important motors of our behavior.

Art is communication of feelings.

Art must originate with an experience or feeling of the artist.

The aim of art is to project an inner vision into the world without.

Art is the way of the Absolute and to the essence of human life – creative action, with sensitivity, that positive state of innocence.

Art is an expression of life and transcends both time and space.

I never wanted a job in an office or any job that I had to work eight hours a day at – day in and day out. I don’t think I could have stood it.

The true artist has no public; he works for the sheer joy of it, with an element of playfulness, of casualness.

Art reaches its greatest peak when devoid of self-consciousness. Freedom discovers man the moment he loses concern over what impression he is making or about to make.

If you are in the now, you are creative.

If you are in the now, you are inventive.

One must not merely copy but try to convey the significance of what you see.

Art is the perfection of nature and life through the artist, who has supreme control of technique and is thereby liberated from it.

Art is really the expression of the self. The more complicated and restricted the method, the less the opportunity for the expression of one’s original sense of freedom.

Artists in all fields must learn to observe choicelessly, to digest their observations, and to express them in their work.

I’m not the type of guy who can sit in the office doing the same routine day in and day out. I have to do something that is creative and interesting to me.

True observation begins when one is devoid of set patterns; freedom of expression occurs when one is beyond system.