Quotes from Chogyam Trungpa

Hope and fear cannot alter the season.

We should see money in terms of the expenditure of energy and how we are going to transmute that energy into a proper use.

Hold the sadness and pain of samsara in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun. Then the warrior can make a proper cup of tea.

When we speak of God or achieving union with God, we are often merely trying to put that great thing into a small container. One cannot drive a camel through the eye of a needle.

For the very reason that we expect things to be good and beautiful, they won't be. In genuine spirituality, we don't look for bliss.

The bad news is you're falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there's no ground.

We must see with our own eyes and not accept any laid-down tradition as if it had some magical power in it.

The artist has tremendous power to change the world.

As long as we relate with our underlying primordial intelligence and as long as we push ourselves a little, by jumping into the middle of situations, then intelligence arises automatically.

The emphasis on practice is because it is the only time in your life you can steer your karmic situation.

Good and bad, happy and sad, all thoughts vanish into emptiness like the imprint of a bird in the sky.

The ideal of warriorship is that the warrior should be sad and tender, and because of that, the warrior can be very brave as well.

Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people because you no longer regard people as a drain on your energy.

Life is a straight drink - straight pleasure, straight pain, straightforward, one hundred percent.

You must personally accept the responsibility of improving your own life.

Things get very clear when you're cornered.

To be a spiritual warrior, one must have a broken heart; without a broken heart and the sense of tenderness and vulnerability, your warriorship is untrustworthy.

The strongest of us are those that are spiritually strong, and a spiritual warrior is one of vulnerability.

We can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spirituality when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques.

meditation is a way of developing clarity, which allows us to see the precision of daily life situations as well as our thought process so that we can relate with both of them fully and completely.

The basic wisdom of Shambhala is that in this world, as it is, we can find a good and meaningful human life that will also serve others. That is our true richness.

Spirituality doesn't exist on another level different from ordinary life.

The complexities of life situations are really not as complicated as we tend to experience them.

The charnel ground is that great graveyard in which the complexities of samsara and nirvana lie buried.