In Buddhism, the opposite of pleasure is not pain but delusion.

Everything is deeply personal; it just has nothing to do with you.

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

“It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.”

A Japanese psychiatrist asked every prospective patient to keep a daily journal. He consented to see each one only after all her sentences were devoted to the world outside her.

“Consistency,” Wilde declared in an essay, “is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

Soon after the war, Japan’s most assertive novelist, Yukio Mishima, published a book whose title—Confessions of a Mask—was pure Wilde, as were its sentiments: “It is precisely what people regard as my true self that is a masquerade.”

Words only separate what silence brings together.

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.