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“If you can start the day without caffeine or pep pills, If you can be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains, If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles, If you can eat the same food every day and be grateful for it, If you can understand when loved ones are too busy to give you time, If you can overlook when people take things out on you when, through no fault of yours, something goes wrong, If you can take criticism and blame without resentment, If you can face the world without lies and deceit, If you can conquer tension without medical help, If you can relax without liquor, If you can sleep without the aid of drugs, Then you are probably a dog or a cat.”
― David Chernikoff, Life, Part Two: Seven Keys to Awakening with Purpose and Joy as You Age

“My body and my psychological states are constantly changing, like the oil and lamps that support the flames. But, like those flames and those lamps, they constitute a causal sequence with a common function. And we have a convention of calling distinct members of such sequences by the same name. So, in one obvious sense, I am not identical to the person called by my name yesterday. We are alike, causally related, but numerically distinct. In another sense, though, we are the same person. We share a name, many properties, a causal history, and a social role; and that, while not involving a self, is enough.”
― Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

“Awareness is most plausibly an umbrella property that reflects an extremely complex set of underlying properties and relations. If this is the case, awareness can be present—a person can be aware—without there being any single thing that is aware, just as a nation or a corporation can act without there being any singular entity that performs that action.”
― Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self

“There are two kinds of suffering: the suffering that leads to more suffering and the suffering that leads to the end of suffering. If you are not willing to face the second kind of suffering, you will surely continue to experience the first. —Ajahn Chah”
― David Chernikoff, Life, Part Two: Seven Keys to Awakening with Purpose and Joy as You Age