Taoism Quotes
Dwelling on the past is like dragging a boat over dry land.
When the ego is in the driver’s seat, we judge. When our spirit, our authentic self, is in control, we practice listening (without judging), compassion, and love
When you change the way you feel, it changes the way you think. When you change the way you think, you change the way you deal with everything in life.
Everything is in the root. If you pick the weed without getting the root out of the soil, be assured, it is going to grow back.
You know that you won’t remain Centered all the time, and it is a normal part of human life to drift left or right of Center sometimes.
The expensive car you bought doesn’t matter, but the way you treated the sales man did.
When the ego is in the driver’s seat, we judge. When our spirit, our authentic self, is in control, we practice listening (without judging), compassion, and love.
When I think of Tao, I think of the artist Bob Ross and his famous painting techniques. I can hear him say, “It’s your tree, you can make it look any way you want to.
Only he who has no use for the empire is fit to be entrusted with it.
As long as some sufferThe River Flows ForeverAs long as there is painThe River Flows ForeverAs strong as a smile can beThe River will Flow Forever
The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror - going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing.
The sage is still not because he takes stillness to be good and therefore is still. The ten thousand things are insufficient to distract his mind - that is the reason he is still.
A person with a mind is bound to be filled with conceptions. These conceptions prevent him from knowing things directly, so a person with a mind shall never really know.
The Spirit Tower has its guardian, but unless it understands who its guardian is, it cannot be guarded.
If you can dispense with reputation, then you are free from care. Reputation is only a visitor, but reality is here to stay.
Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you.
Well-being, or wholeness, implies integrity and harmony between all existing elements, providing freedom for the whole.
Getting down to the gym a couple days a week and having low-fat milk in your morning latte isn’t going to make much of a dent in a system or lifestyle that is essentially, well, unwell.
Appreciation, affection, focus and intention fill up the space of self-reflection, and one loses oneself in the engagement. And what a relief it is when you get there.
The essential war within, and the cause of suffering, begins with the presumption that yearning, impulse and curiosity, desire and question, exist so as to end them. To attain, to acquire, to answer.
The subjective experience of intense pain (“That’s all I can take”) corresponds exactly to one’s subjective experience in relation to truth (“That’s all I can take”).
By its nature, what you yearn for is most often intimidating. It produces, and itself is, a question, and one that is not easy to engage or answer.
My intention is not to define a perfect life and then cause an unhappy analysis of what you are not doing correctly or are incapable of doing.
If you are “playing” too much or “working” too much, you will have a reaction on the other side, which indicates your pace is off, too slow or too fast.
Sometimes I wonder how much of our suffering we allow or impose on ourselves simply in search of our worthiness to accept our own respect and appreciation.
The exact proportion and combination of the qualities within you, as they are, even while you search and struggle for them to be different or better, is a unique beauty.
In making a clear distinction between desire (answer) and yearning (question), we inevitably end up back at personal purpose.
What you have to do to achieve what you want necessitates the creative actualization of the totality of your being as it is. Nothing more, but also nothing less.
The challenges are illusions, but necessary ones to determine if you can see through them.
What is at the base of shame or guilt? It is the consciousness of an imbalance, or of an action in the past that has caused, and probably continues to cause, suffering.
If you know what life really wants, and if you know what you really want, you can begin to create the relationship.
Transformation, on the other hand, is creating beauty from horror or destruction (or, for beginners, an actually pleasant evening with the usual family problems).
I think that as a species we’ve played at being the self-indulgent, spoiled adolescent way too long, and now there are permanent damages and absolute risks that most people are ignoring.
Through the realization of the potentials and possibilities within and outside of you, one connects imagination with reality. What could be becomes so.
The purest definition of “religious” is: relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality.
We do have some capacity to determine how things evolve, and how we evolve, individually and as a community or race. That’s a tremendous freedom and a tremendous responsibility.
The man who has forgotten self may be said to have entered Heaven.
Men all pay homage to what understanding understands, but no one understands enough to rely upon what understanding does not understand and thereby come to understand.
If practicality and morality are polarized and you must choose, you must do what you think is right, rather than what you think is practical.
The clouds above us join and separate, The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns.Life is like that, so why not relax?Who can stop us from celebrating?
Division and differentiation are the processes by which things are created. Since things are emerging and dissolving all the time, you cannot specify the point when this division will stop.
To solve a problem, you need to remove the cause, not the symptom.
Things joined by profit, when pressed by misfortune and danger, will cast each other aside.
Let your mind wander in simplicity, blend your spirit with the vastness, follow along with things the way they are, and make no room for personal views - then the world will be governed.
Do not use life to give life to death. Do not use death to bring death to life.
Stop a bit and think it over. There do be some knots mighty aisy to tie but the untying is a cat of a different brade.