Zen Quotes
A fool sees himself as another, but a wise man sees others as himself.
To escape from the world means that one's mind is not concerned with the opinions of the world.
Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.
Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen.
Let me give you a wonderful Zen practice. Wake up in the morning...look in the mirror, and laugh at yourself.
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
The Buddha is found in other people - even the ones we do not like very much.
The more you engage in any type of emotion or behavior, the greater your desire for it will become.
I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.
But people of the deepest understanding look within, distracted by nothing. Since a clear mind is the Buddha, they attain the understanding of a Buddha without using the mind.
The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.
Who you allow into the circle of your life will make the difference in the quality of your life.
That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.
Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.
The object of Zen is not to kill all feelings and become anesthetized to pain and fear. The object of Zen is to free us to scream loudly and fully when it is time to scream.
The one who praises you is a thief. The one who criticizes you is your true friend.
Your true home is in the here and the now.
If you want to help sentient beings, you have to get your hands dirty.
True communication depends upon our being straightforward with one another... But the best way to communicate may be just to sit without saying anything.
For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.
I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.
You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.
So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
Your life today is the result of a series of decisions you made that have caused you to arrive where you are.
An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality.
The best way for you to get that new experience is to change your response to what happens.
We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.
It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.
And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.
What determines each person's state of happiness or unhappiness is not the event itself, but what the event means to that person.
You can be happy if you are willing to let go of your past and leave yourself unencumbered so you can fly freely.
When mountain-climbing is made too easy, the spiritual effect the mountain exercises vanishes into the air.
When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.
The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.
Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.
Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.
There is only one way to achieve lasting happiness. That is simply: Be happy.
Stress comes from the way you relate to events or situations.
The prospect of future lives in remote heavens as a compensation for the inadequacy of our present lives is a bad tradeoff for losing out on the present.
Courage is often associated with aggression, but instead should be seen as a willingness to act from the heart.
What we can change is our perceptions, which have the effect of changing everything.
Each situation is a blossom to be picked with a curious spirit.
I felt a taste of that other kind of contentment that doesn't come from acquiring information or getting praise or building a resume, the kind that is just there, like a hidden pearl.