Tibetan

A Buddhist prayer: May I be born in circumstances that I may experience the Dharma that will bring me to awaken the heart of boundless compassion and discover inner freedom.

No matter what circumstances or what worlds we find ourselves in, we are without any expectations or changes. We are just what we are, the Natural State which is like a mirror. It is clear and empty, and yet it reflects everything, all possible existences and all possible lifetimes. But it never changes and it does not depend on anything else.
~ Bon Lopon Tenzin Namdak

Always recognize the dreamlike qualities of life and reduce attachment and aversion. Practice good-heartedness towards all beings. Be loving and compassionate, no matter what others do to you. What they do will not matter so much when you see it as a dream. The trick is to have a positive intention during the dream. This is the essential point.
~ CHAGDUD TULKU RINPOCHE

The reason why you do not touch fire is because you know that it will cause you to suffer. Likewise, if you truly understand karma, you will not commit a single negative action, because unless that negative karma is purified, you know that it will eventually ripen into suffering.

You might forget this natural process, or you might not believe in it, because the ripening does not always happen immediately. But your karma will follow you like your shadow, that gets closer and closer without you realising, until you are eventually touched by it. Please, I urge you to always remember this.
~ Chamtrul Rinpoche

Although the warrior’s life is dedicated to helping others, he realizes that he will never be able to completely share his experience with others…Yet he is more and more in love with the world. That combination of love affair and loneliness is what enables the warrior to constantly reach out to help others. By renouncing his private world, the warrior discovers a greater universe and a fuller and fuller broken heart. This is not something to feel bad about; it is a cause for rejoicing.
~ Chögyam Trungpa

If we face ourselves properly, fully, then we find that something exists in us that is basically awake, as opposed to asleep. We find something intrinsically cheerful and fundamentally pride-worthy. That is to say, we don’t have to con ourselves. We discover genuine one-hundred-percent gold, not even twenty-four carat. We are fundamentally awake. You might think this is just an old myth, another trick to cheer us up. But no! It is real and good.
~ Chögyam Trungpa

**‘Love in not the experience of beauty and romantic joy alone. Love or compassion, the open path, is associated with “what is.” In order to develop love - universal love, cosmic love, whatever you would like to call it - one must accept the whole situation of life as it is, both the light and the dark, the good and the bad. One must open oneself to life, communicate with it.’Accepting Life As It Is. **
~ CHOGYAM TRUNGPA, CUTTING THROUGH SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM

The basics teachings of Buddha are about understanding what we are, who we are, why we are. When we begin to realize what we are, who we are, why we are, then we begin to realize what we are not, who we are not, why we are not. We begin to realize that we don’t have basic, substantial, solid, fundamental ground that we can exert anymore. We begin to realize that our ideas of security and our concept of freedom have been purely phantom experiences.
~ Chogyam Trungpa

It is completely natural that thoughts keep on arising. The point is not to try to stop them, which would be impossible anyway, but to liberate them. This is done by remaining in a state of simplicity, which lets thoughts arise and vanish again without stringing onto them any further thoughts. When you no longer perpetuate the movement of thoughts, they dissolve by themselves without leaving any trace. When you no longer spoil the state of stillness with mental fabrications, you can maintain the natural serenity of mind without any effort. Sometimes, let your thoughts flow, and watch the unchanging nature behind them. Sometimes, abruptly cutting the flow of thoughts, look at naked awareness.
~ Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

When a rainbow appears vividly in the sky, you can see its beautiful colors, yet you could not wear as clothing or put it on as an ornament. It arises through the conjunction of various factors, but there is nothing about it that can be grasped. Likewise, thoughts that arise in the mind have no tangible existence or intrinsic solidity. There is no logical reason why thoughts, which have no substance, should have so much power over you, nor is there any reason why you should become their slave.

Recognizing the empty, nonexistent, insubstantial nature of the ego is meditation on absolute bodhicitta.
~ Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

Grasping to a non-existent self, we misread our world and lose the true treasure of our mind. Because of our belief in a self that must be preserved at all costs, ego controls our every mental, emotional, verbal, and physical act. Although our wisdom mind is completely radiant at all times, we become like a homeless prince: a monarch who lives like a vagabond, unaware of his own inheritance.
~ Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche

The practice of all the bodhisattvas is to turn away immediately From those things which bring desire and attachment. For the pleasures of the senses are just like salty water: The more we taste of them, the more our thirst increases.
~ Gyelse Tokme Zangpo

All of samsara and nirvana are your own mind. They don’t arise from anything else in the slightest. Everything, such as joy and suffering, good and bad, high and low, are the conceptual constructs of mind.
~ Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro

When you run after your thoughts, you are like a dog chasing a stick. Every time a stick is thrown, you run after it. Instead, be like a lion who, rather than chasing after the stick, turns to face the thrower. One only throws a stick at a lion once.
~ Jetsun Milarepa

Since there is only this pure observing, there will be found a lucid clarity without anyone being there who is the observer; only a naked manifest awareness is present. (This awareness) is empty and immaculately pure, not being created by anything whatsoever.
~ Karma Lingpa

I have understood this body of mine to be the product of ignorance, composed of flesh and blood and lit up by the perceptive power of consciousness. To those fortunate ones who long for emancipation it may be the great vessel by which they may procure Freedom. But to the unfortunates who only sin, it may be the guide to lower and miserable states of existence. This our life is the boundary mark whence one may take an upward or downward path. Our present time is a most precious time, wherein each of us must decide, in one way or other, for lasting good or lasting ill.
~ Milarepa of Tibet

Clarity is a sense of being able to see into the nature of things as though all reality were a landscape lit up on a brilliantly sunny day without clouds. Everything appears distinct and everything makes sense. Even disturbing thougths and emotions have their place in this brilliant landscape.
~ Mingyur Rinpoche

But if, through fundamental misperception of reality, the individual enters into the confusion of dualism, primordial consciousness, which is in fact the source of all manifestation (even of dualistic consciousness and, in fact, of all phenomena), itself becomes obscured. The individual’s deluded mind then mistakes the manifestations of its own pure, innate primordial awareness for an external reality existing separately from itself, which it endlessly, and ultimately unsuccessfully, attempts to manipulate, trying in vain to bring an end to the continual underlying sense of dissatisfaction and unease which is the inevitable experience of the obscuration of pure awareness. The experience of underlying dissatisfaction (or ‘dukha’ in Sanskrit) that unavoidably arises with a deluded mind, continues, no matter how ‘successful’ the individual becomes in dealing with his or her world in materialistic terms, until the individual regains the experience of the primordial state.
~ Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche

Difficult things provoke all your irritations and bring your habitual patterns to the surface. And that becomes the moment of truth. You have the choice to launch into your lousy habitual patterns or to stay with the rawness and discomfort of the situation and let it transform you.
~ Pema Chodron

You are the sky. Everything else is just the weather.
~ Pema Chodron

Everything is on fire. The senses are on fire, of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. The mind is on fire with beliefs, opinions, fears, doubts, anxieties, and ignorance. The body is on fire with decay, pain, injury, sickness and death. Yet, I say to you Sangha, there is no need for panic. Indeed, panic is part of the delusion of samsara. Impermanence is a rule of form. What comes to be will also come to pass. Do not attempt to hold movement. Resting in awareness, the fires of samsara cannot burn you. It burns only what is untrue. See clearly, Sangha, and you will know that while you think you are burning with it, it is only the ego which burns. Rest in this fire of being. It will only destroy what is untrue. This fire is holy, it purifies. It will reveal the ego as false and your unnamed nature as what is.
~ Silent Gong

True spirituality is to be aware that if we are interdependent with everything and everyone else, even our smallest, least significant thought, word and action have real consequences throughout the universe.
~ Sogyal Rinpoche

Modern civilization is largely devoted to the pursuit of the cult of delusion… The nature of mind is hardly ever mentioned by writers or intellectuals; most scientists deny its possibility. It plays no part in popular culture: no one sings about it, no one talks about it, it’s not on TV. We are actually educated into believing that nothing is real beyond what we can perceive with our ordinary senses.
~ Sogyal Rinpoche

Our society is dedicated almost entirely to the celebration of ego, with all its sad fantasies about success and power, and it celebrates those very forces of greed and ignorance that are destroying the planet.
~ Sogyal Rinpoche

Ultimately there is light and love and intelligence in this universe. And we are it.
~ Tenzin Palmo

You must be ready to accept the possibility that there is a limitless range of awareness for which we now have no words; that awareness can expand beyond range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them.
~ Tibetan Book of The Dead

Bardo Dieties
Remember the clear light, the pure clear white light from which everything in the universe comes, to which everything in the universe returns; the original nature of your own mind. The natural state of the universe unmanifest. Let go into the clear light, trust it, merge with it. It is your own true nature, it is home.
~ Tibetan Book of the Dead

KYE MA! Listen with sympathy! With insight into your sorry worldly predicament, Realising that nothing can last, that all is as dreamlike illusion, Meaningless illusion provoking frustration and boredom, Turn around and abandon your mundane pursuits.
~ Tilopa’s Song of Mahamudra to Naropa

Illusion immediately becomes more workable when we acknowledge it as simply an illusion. The Western habit is to work against the grain and to try and organize the illusory into something solid and structured … In the stressful attempt to nail down the illusory nature of things, our chance to be at ease, spacious, awake, and free, which already exists within ourselves, gets lost.
~ Tsoknyi Rinpoche