“Spiritual mastery is never easy. It takes much more time and personal application than physical development does. Spirtual mastery, however, is the path we are all on. Some of us simply do not choose to believe it.”

“Fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It's the mastery of fear. It's about getting up one more time than we fall down.”

“It is easy to measure your mastery of the results via a conventional examination; it is less easy to measure your mastery of doing mathematics, of creating new (to you) results, and of your ability to surmount the almost infinite details to see the general situation.”

“Accomplishment, the feeling of absorption in the flow, of mastery for its own sake, of knowing how to do this thing, is what keeps all of us doing what we do, if we like what we do at all.”

“Art calls for complete mastery of techniques, developed by reflection within the soul.”

“What typically emerges from looking at kids, gifted and ordinary, is that, from the kids’ point of view, accomplishment, that is, the private sense of mastery, the hard thing suddenly made easy, counts for far more in their inner lives than does the achievement—the competition won, the reward secured.”

“Could technology, understood as the disposition and activity of mastery, turn out to be a stumbling block in the path of the master himself?”

“We defer to authority figures because they are supposed to know more than we do. If a mistake is made, it's easy to lay the blame at their feet. Ultimately, however, we are responsible for choosing the authority figure we defer to. Choosing to defer to one who urges aggression against others still puts the responsibility on us.””

“We are all fellow passengers on a dot of earth. And each of us, in the span of time, has really only a moment among our companions. How incredible it is that in this fragile existence, we should hate and destroy one another. There are possibilities enough for all who will abandon mastery over others to pursue mastery over nature. There is world enough for all to seek their happiness in their own way.”

“The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.”