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"Words themselves are neutral. It's the charge we add to them that matters."
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"All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer."

"Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts."

"Great is language . . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences,It is the fulness and color and form and diversity of the earth . . . . and of men and women . . . . and of all qualities and processes;It is greater than wealth . . . . it is greater than buildings or ships or religions or paintings or music."

"Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin."

"Language is a tool for communicating and not a barrier to writing."

"I want to hear you wound my lovely language with your rough barbarian tongue."

"English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing."
Explore more quotes by Pema Chodron

"Making good use of our limited time - the limited time from birth to death, as well as our limited time each day - is the key to developing inner steadiness and calm."

"Without giving up hope-that there's somewhere better to be, that there's someone better to be-we will never relax with where we are or who we are."

"We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that's death. Seeking security or perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed and whole, self contained and comfortable, is some kind of death. It doesn't have any fresh air. There's no room for something to come in and interrupt all that. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience."

"In order to work with difficult outer circumstances, we need to gather our inner strength. If even ten or twenty minutes of meditation a day helps us to do this, let's go for it!"

"Yesterday I talked about cultivating precision, gentleness, and openess, and described how the meditation technique helps us to remember the qualities that we already possess."

"When one of the emperors of China asked Bodhidharma (the Zen master who brought Zen from India to China) what enlightenment was, his answer was, 'Lots of space, nothing holy. Meditation is nothing holy. Therefore there's nothing that you think or feel that somehow gets put in the category of 'sin. There's nothing that you can think or feel that gets put in the category of 'bad. There's nothing that you can think or feel that gets put in the category of 'wrong. It's all good juicy stuff-the manure of waking up, the manure of achieving enlightenment, the art of living in the present moment."

"There's more to liberation than trying to avoid discomfort, more to lasting happiness than pursuing temporary pleasures, temporary relief."

"When we resist change, it's called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into it's dynamic quality, that's called enlightenment."

"WE ALREADY HAVE everything we need. There is no need for self-improvement. All these trips that we lay on ourselves-the heavy-duty fearing that we're bad and hoping that we're good, the identities that we so dearly cling to, the rage, the jealousy and the addictions of all kinds-never touch our basic wealth. They are like clouds that temporarily block the sun. But all the time our warmth and brilliance are right here. This is who we really are. We are one blink of an eye away from being fully awake."
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