43 Quotes by Stephen Mitchell

It is better to do your own duty badly than to perfectly do an others; when you do your duty, you are naturally free from sin.

What people love about life is its miraculous beauty; what they hate about death is the loss and decay around it. Yet losing is not losing, and decay turns into beauty, as beauty turns back into decay. We are breathed in, breathed out. Therefore all you need is to understand the one breath that makes up the world.

What may appear to be proud ungrateful and headstrong fron the outside may from the inside express an unshakable integrity of character. Pride, if it doesn't step over the line into arrogance, is simply an unprejudiced self-esteem. Ingratitude is the appropriate response to a kindness that has hooks on it. Headstrong is another word for trusting your own heart.

So actions themselves are not good and not bad; only the intention is important.

There are two kinds of women: those who marry princes and those who marry frogs. The frogs never become princes, but it is an acknowledged fact that a prince may very well, in the course of an ordinary marrige, gradually, at first almost imperceptibly, turn into a frog. Happy the woman who after twenty-five years still wakes up beside the prince she fell in love with.

Creativity, not normality, has become the paradigm of mental health.

Happily ever after doesn't begin with Once upon a time: it begins with Now.

[Jesus] teaches that just as the sun gives light to both wicked and good, and the rain brings nourishment to righteous and unrighteous, God's compassion embraces all people. There are no pre-conditions for it, nothing we need to do first, nothing we have to believe. When we are ready to receive it, it is already there. And the more we live in its presence, the more effortlessly if flows through us, until we find that we no longer need external rules or Bibles or Messiahs.

The physical body is acknowledged as dust, the personal drama as delusion. It is as if the world we perceive through our senses, the whole gorgeous and terrible pageant, were the breath-thin surface of a bubble, and everything else, inside and outside, is pure radiance. Both suffering and joy come then like a brief reflection, and death like a pin.