“Practice is necessary. You can't learn to swim just by reading a book about swimming. Otherwise, you will continue to look for teachers at each stop.”

“I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I’m like that. If I stop reading, I die.”

“Another lesson to be learned, to continue using my oceanographic metaphor, is that while you are swimming and not sinking you should aim for rough water.”

“Buddhas and Ancestors continuously maintain ocean mudra samadhi. While swimming in this samadhi, they expound, realize, practice.”

“One's character is set at an early age. The choices you make now will affect you for the rest of your life. I hate to see you swim out so far you can't swim back.”

“If you come to a spiritual teacher — or this book — looking for stimulating ideas, theories, beliefs, intellectual discussions, then you will be disappointed. This is not a book to be read from cover to cover and then put away. Live with it, pick it up frequently, and more importantly, put it down frequently, or spend more time holding it than reading it. Many readers will feel naturally inclined to stop reading after each entry, to pause, reflect, become still. It is always more helpful and more important to stop reading than to continue reading. Allow the book to do its work, to awaken you from the old grooves of your repetitive and conditioned thinking.”

“Stop swimming around in your own mind. That is a dangerous neighborhood that you should not go into alone.”

“People disagreeing everywhere you look
Makes you wanna stop and read a book”

“If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read "President Can't Swim.”

“Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?”