32 Quotes by Roland Merullo

All difficulties in this life, every moment of difficulty, come from the distance between what is and what we want to be.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: It is built on our thoughts, it is made from our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with evil thought, pain follows him, just like the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the cart. If a person speaks or acts with pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves...

There are teachers who say that one of the main obstacles, spiritual obstacles, for westerners is a sense of unworthiness, a self-limiting sense of what’s possible for them in a human life.

What difference makes what you believe? What happens will happen anyway, exactly the same, no matter what you believe. What you do makes the important part. What you do.

Inside the big world that you cannot control, you have the small world of you that you can control. In that small world, if you look, you can see whether to go this way toward good, or the other way toward bad.

Because to live without the cup means you must feel the world as the world really is. People make the armor from their smartness, or their anger, or their quiet, or their fear, or their being busy, or their being nice. Some people make it from a big show, always talking. Some make it by being very important. Many people do not make it, though, and those people can begin to see the world as it is.

I thought I heard a cow mooing in Seese’s back yard. Later on, later down the road, as they say, I would learn that this was the sound of the Rinpoche chanting some ancient prayer. But, at that moment, it sounded to me very much like a mooing cow.

It’s like the difference between a kid who goes to school and learns and a kid who goes to school and learns and comes home to parents who are reading to her and talking to her about the world, showing her things, teaching by their actions.

When you have known someone your whole life you don’t need a lot of warm-up time to get into a big argument. All the fore-play has been done years ago, and so the battle sits in your memory like stove gas awaiting the match. A wrong word, a careless allusion, and the old fire is suddenly raging.