Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.

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.

Do not depreciate a creation of God

Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

Music is the art of sounds in the movement of time.

One evening you may learn about enlightenment, koans, meditation and personal power.

American democracy and the Soviet system may peacefully exist side by side and compete with each other. But one cannot evolve into the other.

Life is short. But desire, desire is long.

I am a life, that was changed.

I think if Donald Trump should become commander in chief, we all want that in a leader, somebody who is able to fight back.

We photographers say that we take a picture, and in a certain sense, that is true. We take something from people's lives, but in doing so we tell their story.

Well, I'm not saying that America is a bad place or anything. I just think 9/11 needed to happen sooner or later.