For a time Jack was angry; but when he had been without the jacket for a short while he began to realize that being half-clothed is infinitely more uncomfortable than being entirely naked. Soon he did not miss his clothing in the least, and from that he came to revel in the freedom of his unhampered state.
I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
The Buddha's insight into the middle way is not simply about a balance between extremes. This conventional understanding misses the deeper revelation of the middle way as being the very nature of unexcelled enlightenment. The middle way is an invitation to leap beyond nirvana and samsara and to realize the unborn Buddha mind right in the middle of everywhere.
We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.
Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Among the writers of all ages, some deserve fame, and have it; others neither have nor deserve it; some have it, not deserving it; others, though deserving it, yet totally miss it, or have it not equal to their deserts.
It's a mystery to me how anyone ever gets any nourishment in this place. They must eat their meals standing up by the window so as to be sure of not missing anything.
It is possible to fail in many ways . . . while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult - to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult).
If you filter my words through any tradition or '-ism', you will miss altogether what I am saying. The liberating truth is not static; it is alive. It cannot be put into concepts and be understood by the mind. The truth lies beyond all forms of conceptual fundamentalism. What you are is the beyond—awake and present, here and now already. I am simply helping you to realize that.
I think that today, faith drives so much of our politics, that I thought, "If you don't talk about it, you are missing a whole big part of what is going on politically."
For example, Americans seem reluctant to take on Shakespeare because you don't think you're very good at it - which is rubbish. You're missing out here.