D.T. Suzuki Quotes

Leave your front door and your back door open. Allow your thoughts to come and go. Just don't serve them tea.

When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.

Unless we are willing to encourage our children to reconnect with and appreciate the natural world, we can't expect them to help protect and care for it.

When we start to feel anxious or depressed, instead of asking, "What do I need to get to be happy?" The question becomes, "What am I doing to disturb the inner peace that I already have?"

Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble. You yourself make the waves in your mind. If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm. This mind is called big mind.

Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.

The truth of Zen, just a little bit of it, is what turns one's humdrum life, a life of monotonous, uninspiring commonplaceness, into one of art, full of genuine inner creativity.

If you can just appreciate each thing, one by one, then you will have pure gratitude. Even though you observe just one flower, that one flower includes everything

The most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your two feet.

Wherever you go you will find your teacher, as long as you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.

As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.

The truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect.

Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.

We have two eyes to see two sides of things, but there must be a third eye which will see everything at the same time and yet not see anything. That is to understand Zen.

It must be obvious...that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

If all humans disappeared today ,the earth would start improving tomorrow.If all the ants disappeared today ,the earth would start dying tomorrow.

Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.

When my master and I were walking in the rain, he would say, 'Do not walk so fast, the rain is everywhere.'

Instead of criticizing, find out how to help.

Change is never easy, and it often creates discord, but when people come together for the good of humanity and the Earth, we can accomplish great things.

If you have attained something, this is the surest proof that you have gone astray. Therefore, not to have is to have, silence is thunder, ignorance is enlightenment.

I am an artist at living - my work of art is my life.

How much 'ego' do you need? Just enough so that you don't step in front of a bus.

If I ever saw myself saying I'm excited going to Cleveland, I'd punch myself in the face, because I'm lying.

Everything is perfect, but there is a lot of room for improvement.

A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it....In this way our life should be understood. Then there is no problem.

It is easy to have calmness in inactivity, it is hard to have calmness in activity, but calmness in activity is true calmness.

Whereever you are, you are one with the clouds and one with the sun and the stars you see. You are one with everything. That is more true than I can say, and more true than you can hear.

I've always prided myself in not reveling in past accomplishments and focusing on future achievement, instead. That's been my career motto.

Things are always changing, so nothing can be yours.

If one day I look out from my cabin's porch and see a row of windmills spinning in the distance, I won't curse them. I will praise them. It will mean we are finally getting somewhere.

Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.

Personally, I don't like the term 'success.' It's too arbitrary and too relative a thing. It's usually someone else's definition, not yours.

If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.

Children learn to smile from their parents.

In nature there is no such thing as waste. In nature nothing is wasted; everything is recycled.

If children hear fine music from the day of their birth and learn to play it, they develop sensitivity, discipline and endurance. They get a beautiful heart.

When we do not expect anything we can be ourselves. That is our way, to live fully in each moment of time.

To Zen, time and eternity are one.

How you imagine the world determines how you live in it.

Unless we agree to suffer we cannot be free from suffering.

Education has failed in a very serious way to convey the most important lesson science can teach: skepticism.

August in Kansas City is hotter than two rats f**king in a sock.

If we want to move towards a low-polluting, sustainable society, we need to get consumers to think about their purchases.

The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. Zen practice is to open up our small mind.

Debating the best way to do something we shouldn't be doing in the first place is a sure way to end up in the wrong place.

Moment after moment everything comes out of nothingness. This is the true joy of life.

You ought to know how to rise above the trivialities of life, in which most people are found drowning themselves.

There is a gyre of discarded floating plastic the size of the continental USA in the ocean. In it, plastic trash outweighs plankton 40 to 1.