In order for your wit to be appreciated, the people around you need to be witty, too. In order for your lightness of being to be appreciated, those around you must be vibrating towards the same weightlessness. In order for your beauty to be appreciated, those around you must have eyes that see beauty. For your authenticity to be appreciated, those who see it must also be authentic. For your humility to be appreciated, those you are dealing with must first know humility in their hearts. You see, you have spent too much time trying to be appreciated by those who are not good enough to appreciate you. That's the truth. Those who are better than they, will see you for the beauty that you are.

Some people center the universe around themselves; while making other people nothing but decorations to their existence. "I will do this and then I will do that and then people will think this about me and then people will think that about me, and then I will add that person to my life when the convenient time arrives, and this person over here would make a very convenient addition as well..." They build their own thrones for themselves, and add decorations all around their thrones. The problem with that is: it does not bring happiness. A throne must be built for you; it must not be you who builds your own throne. If so, everything that you think you are is only an illusion! And illusions dissolve one day. Poof!

I want you to know that life will try to crack you like an egg and your silence will eventually break. Someday you will spill some of those painful secrets and taste a modicum of much-needed freedom. You will lose a great deal as a result but the gains will outweigh every loss. You will love and be loved by a beautiful man in a place where your mutual passion won’t be a marker of shame but pride. You will be awkward and alone and alien for a long time but you will transform these qualities, which is to say yourself, into a work of art. You will wear your awkwardness, your aloneness and your alienness in your hair like gold thread. You will adorn your wonkiness on your wrist like a charm bracelet studded with stars.

What does it mean to be the master of your own soul, the captain of your own mind? It means that you keep the final say on what you think, feel and do. No one fearful thought can overtake you, no one doubtful feeling can overthrow you from your path, no one memory of pain can turn you away from what is meant for you now; because when the waves of doubt come and the winds of fear blow and the rains of pain fall and feel like they're stinging you again— you say no. You say no. You say that you will be the master of your vessel and you will tell your mind to stay the course, you will tell your heart to stay fixed, you will tell your skin that it knows the touch of silken balms. You are the captain of your own ship.

The real thing that keeps men and women apart, is fear. Women blame men and men blame women, but the culprit is fear, women are afraid of one thing, men are afraid of a different thing; the fears of women have to do with losing while the fears of men have to do with not being good enough for something. One is loss, the other is insecurity. Men are innately more insecure than women and women are innately more needful of companionship than men. It's good for both men and women to be able to recognize and identify these fears not only within themselves, but within each other, and then men and women will see that they really do need to help each other. It's not a game, it's not a competition, the two sexes need one another.

I think that the most beautiful of people are like exquisite serpents— glorious sheen, glorious patterns and elaborate grace— but you do wrong to cast envy upon them, lest you want to also taste of the venom they carry in their mouthes! Beauty is so often born from adversity of circumstance, like the lotus born of the mud, reaching up through the water and into the light! I often wake up from dreams of being underwater, I suppose I am a lotus flower that has made her way! But you do wrong to envy the lotus blossom, for you know not of her journey! Not all of us are serpents and lotus flowers, not all of us are beautiful like that; too many people just sit there, ignorantly casting envy on what they do not even comprehend!

What if... all the rules and ways we lay down in our heads, don't even exist at all? What if we only believe that they're there, because we want to think that they're there? All the formalities of morality and the decisions that we see ourselves making in order to be better (or the best)... what if we think we've got it all under control— but we don't? What if the path for you, is one that you would never dare take because you never saw yourself going that way? And then what if you realized that one day— would you take the path for you? Or would you choose to believe in your rules and your reasons? Your moralities and your hopes? What if your own hope, and your own morality— are going the other way?

In the world that we live in— purity and innocence are the true strengths. It is strength to live in a world like this and remain pure of heart, it is strength to live in a world like this and retain innocence. These are things that the world wants to take away from you, that experiences tend to alter and attempt to redefine. The wild ones aren’t the defiled ones— the wild ones are the pure ones, the innocent ones. It takes a true wildness to retain these things through the fire and through the storms. It takes a real wildness to remain in the wild— not contorted and maligned by circumstance and experiences. And it takes power to stand up and to choose what experiences we allow to take root or to even come into our lives.

What does it mean to be cultured? Who is the cultured person? The cultured individual is not defined nor determined by status in society nor by wealth; but the cultured individual is determined and defined by his or her sense for the art of life. And what is the art of life? The art of life is the reflection of the mind and the soul upon the world, upon other people, upon the respect and understanding of other people and upon the things that are in this world and beyond. There is a joy that is always sought in beautiful things. Being cultured is being conscious, reflective, understanding, feeling, aware. Knowing how to feel, to listen, to understand. A desire to find or to create joy in many things— that is the art of life. And these things define a cultured person.

It is of immense importance, that first and foremost, people identify themselves as human beings, rather than as a believer in a spiritual belief system. Any spiritual belief system. There is such a preoccupation with where a person will be after he/she dies, that people keep on forgetting we are all here right now— on this planet! Okay, so you are on your way to Heaven, of course, whilst many others who do not believe as you do are on their way to hell, of course— but those are not yet facts! The fact that we do have, though, is the fact that we are all here right now, on this Earth, living this life, breathing this air, and it's about time we identify ourselves with the reality in front of us: that we are human beings and we all cry, laugh, love and hurt.

In this world, the thing people fear the most, and what pains people the most— is giving more than they receive. God forbid I cut off more of my fingernail for you than you cut from your fingernail, for me! Heaven forbid I hold my breath in longer while thinking about you, than the amount of time your breath is held in for me! Not a second longer! It is sad fact of the human nature that there you stand as an Infinite Soul and yet your greatest fear is not receiving from another person in proportion to what you give. Your viewpoint is low, your vision is clouded. You have become, in your eyes, a funny little drawing on the paper pad of the universe. Indeed, this race is yet to evolve. And yet, I am surrounded by such fear, to such a great extent that I begin to fear the same!

In every relationship, the deeper the connection goes and the longer the time that passes between the two together— the more and more levels will be dug up which equates to more and more boulders being discovered, more and more buried cities unearthed... people know that a good and real relationship is one that "gets better and better" but then they don't understand what that means. "Getting better and better" doesn't mean "feeling better and better", it doesn't mean there is nothing but honey and dewdrops. "Better and better" means "more and more accomplished together" it means "stronger together" it means herculean victories and lilliputian victories and falling and rising. If, for every time you fall together, you rise together twice, that is a good, real relationship.

There is a single truth, it filters through different stories and languages because people come from different cultures and speak different languages. And this truth has manifested itself through millennia, in multiple ways. Different people belong to different manifestations of truth. Some people take those manifestations and turn them into religions, or into gathering places or into a system. Others take those manifestations and allow that light to illuminate the paths on their inward journeys. All in all, the only reason why there is strife or hatred in any way, is because of the strife and hatred and intolerance inside of people. Truth does not call for any division or any hatred or intolerance of any kind. In order to love one thing, this does not mean we need to put down another one.

Determining when not to overestimate and when not to underestimate is a crucial skill that is not easily acquired. But it's unspeakably important to be able to know when not to underestimate, for example, another person's affections towards you; but then also when not to overestimate the same thing. If only we could all have radar that could tune into these two measures of living, we'd name it something like "humameter" or "give-a-shit-o-meter." Either way, unnamed or named, I've learned that this is among the most important skills accomplishable by mankind. Insecurities should not be allowed to dictate how we determine the amount of value another person has placed on us; fears should not be let in to tell us how much or how little of worth we have in someone else's eyes.

The reason why the world is a difficult place to live in, is due to the fact that people are not interested in people. Nobody is truly interested in anybody; they are only interested in the parts that they think will be pleasurable and comfortable for them to get to know. People don't want to know what you're afraid of, what kind of dreams you have at night, what your eyes look like when you laugh and when you hurt... people want to receive perfect gifts and other people are supposed to be those perfect gifts! But then none of us are those perfect gifts. All of us are real on the inside but then people want what's not real... so how is the world supposed to work, that way? I want to know what's real in people, and in me. And it's hard to be this way, because nobody else is.