The ultimate meditation is: surrender to reality.
The more you fight, the more you are in conflict with it, the more you will be a loser.
In deep surrender, the ego disappears.
And when the ego is not there, for the first time you become aware of that which has always been there.
We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it's easy, but when it is hard.
In the fight against ISIL, we cannot rely on an Assad regime that terrorizes its people; a regime that will never regain the legitimacy it has lost. Instead, we must strengthen the opposition as the best counterweight to extremists like ISIL, while pursuing the political solution necessary to solve Syria's crisis once and for all.
For the greater a man's works for the future, the less the present can comprehend them; the harder his fight, and the rarer success. If, however, once in centuries success does come to a man, perhaps in his latter days a faint beam of his coming glory may shine upon him. To be sure, these great men are only the Marathon runners of history; the laurel wreath of the present touches only the brow of the dying hero.
Most governments are pragmatic, most people are logical. There are pockets of extremism in Israel, in the U.S. and in the Muslim world. But we have to fight them with reason, with logic and with compassion.
The strategic objective is to help Iraq government succeed.That's the strategic and not only to help the government the reformers in Iraq succeed, but to help the reformers across the region succeed to fight off the elements of extremism.
I've got a group who can't play music, one bad comedian plus boyfriend, a nervous breakdown calling himself a magician, two coachloads of 70-year-old religious maniacs looking for a fight and a fancy-dress contest that nobody knew about.
I have more fans and more followers and more supporters. Because the people who actually saw the Joe Frazier Muhammad Ali fight, they saw me win at least nine rounds - the people who know boxing.
When there is a fight of reason versus emotion and the mind wonders which one to follow, in most times, emotion wins over reason. But it is reason that should win and emotion shouldn't.