Real love always hurts because it transforms. If you are courageous enough and you can absorb the hurt, the pain, the agony of transformation, you will feel grateful later on. Only later on you can feel grateful; right now it will be rough going. Don’t be worried about the inner core. Let me destroy your outer core and you will be in touch with your inner core; there is no problem about it. The first thing is to destroy the hard crust that has grown around you, and it is hurting. You would like to remain as you are and be in touch with your inner core; that is not possible. I am helpless, I cannot help you that way. I have to dismantle the whole house – I don’t believe in renovation. First the whole house, the whole rotten ruin has to be destroyed and removed.

True lovers both give and receive trust. Although trusting can be scary, it is only by opening yourself up to love (and thus by letting yourself become vulnerable and trusting that the other person will not hurt you) that you truly discover the beauty in letting another person into your inner world. It's a feeling that lets you close your eyes and know that someone believes in you and will catch you when you fall. In other words, trusting fully allows you to fully feel love.

I 
Have 
Learned 
So much from God 
That I can no longer 
Call 
Myself

A Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim,
a Buddhist, a Jew.

The Truth has shared so much of Itself
With me

That I can no longer call myself
A man, a woman, an angel,
Or even a pure
Soul.

Love has
Befriended Hafiz so completely
It has turned to ash
And freed
Me

Of every concept and image
my mind has ever known.

From: 'The Gift' 

Why put requirements on feeling good? True life is being given to us all the time; we just have to let it in all the time. True life is instant and complete gratification that costs nothing. Being free is in your head.

Drop guilt — because to be guilty is to live in hell. Not to be guilty, and you will have the freshness of dewdrops in the early morning sun, you will have the freshness of the lotus petals in the lake, you will have the freshness of the stars in the night. Once guilt disappears you will have a totally different kind of life, luminous and radiant. You will have a dance to your feet and your heart will be singing a thousand and one songs.

When for the first time you fall in love, you meet the opposite. Immediately, it is as if you have got wings, you can fly; poetry arises in your heart. What is happening? The opposite has created something in you. Silence alone is not very beautiful, sound alone is not very beautiful, but the meeting of sound and silence is very, very beautiful -- that is music. The meeting of silence and sound is music.

"If life goes naturally, beautifully, if there are no life-negative teachers, if there are no politicians and priests to distract you – then nearabout the age of forty-two, exactly as sexual maturity comes, comes meditation maturity. Nearabout the age of forty-two, one starts feeling to fall inwards. Near the age of fourteen, one starts falling towards the other, becomes extrovert. Love is extroversion; relationship is to think of the other. Meditation is introversion; meditation is to think of one's own self, of one's own center.

"Between the age of fourteen and the age of forty-two there comes a change. By and by one lives life, knows what love is, knows its fulfillment and its frustration, knows its joys and its sadness, knows its beauty and its ugliness, knows that there are moments of great ecstasy and then great valleys of darkness. Then one starts by and by moving towards his own self, because to depend on the other can never be really ecstatic. If your joy depends on the other, that joy can never have the quality of freedom in it. And a joy which does not have the quality of freedom is not much joy. If your are dependent on the other, then there is a limitation.

"And the joy that comes through love is momentary. You can meet with the other only for moments, and then again you are separate and you fall apart. Just in the middle of it you fall apart. Just for a moment you become joined together. Then one starts thinking. "Is there a way to become one with existence and never to fall apart again?" That's what meditation is. Love is joining with existence through another person for only moments. Meditation is getting joined together with existence eternally. "Yoga" means to join together.

"This has to happen somewhere in the deepest core. And then there is joy and then there is freedom. And then there is bliss and there is no dark valley following it. Then happiness is eternal, then celebration is eternal."

From the very early morning, when you feel life awakening, when you feel that the sleep has gone, the first thought must be of this saturation ― now the Divine is opening, coming back out of sleep, not you. So Hindus, who have been one of the most penetrating races in the world, will start their first breath with the name of God. Now it has become a formality and the essential has been lost, but this was the root of it ― that at the moment you become alert in the morning you must not remember yourself, you must remember the Divine. The Divine must become the first remembrance ― and the last, at night, when you are falling asleep. The Divine must be remembered: he must be the first and the last. And if he is really the first in the morning and the last at night, he will be with you the whole day, in the middle also. 

Defeat is something that happens to you. What you do after it is your choice. You can either give up, become discouraged, or become more determined than ever. 

Compromise doesn't mean sacrificing half the time. It means finding a solution that wasn't what each person had first imagined for themselves, but feels good and satisfied with overall.

O good Jesus, thou has bound my heart in the thought of thy name, and now I can not but sing it; therefore have mercy upon me, making perfect that thou hast ordained.
   – RICHARD ROLLE

When you are walking is one of the best times to repeat the mantram, especially if you walk briskly. The rhythm of your footsteps, the rhythm of the mantram, and the rhythm of your breathing all harmonize to soothe and invigorate the body and mind. Breathing is closely connected with your state of mind. People who are tense or angry breathe rapidly and irregularly; those who are calm, loving, and secure breathe smoothly, slowly, and deeply. A brisk walk helps to make your breathing rhythm deep and even, and the mantram will help to calm your mind.

If you have a situation arise that goes poorly, think of what you would have done instead, then let it go as your lesson. When the situation shows up again at a different time with different names and faces attached, do what you would have done the last time in hindsight. Lessons have to be learned before they can be put into practice. Recognizing your role in situations and how you can act differently will release you from patterns that you've learned just don't turn out well.