If you want to study Zen, you should forget all your previous ideas and just practice zazen and see what kind of experience you have in your practice. That is naturalness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You can chase love. If you are lucky enough to catch it…is it really yours?

You may forget the one with whom you have laughed, but never the one with whom you have wept.

Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.

If you pass something every day and it has a little character, it begins to intrigue you.

If it was possible for me to adopt, I probably would, but no one's going to let me adopt.

Football is what I love, and I know I can do it, too.

Each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of "form" to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled.

I open my arms wide and declare with love that I deserve and accept all good!

I enjoy writing in a lot of different styles, so I pushed to find that vicious place, or that vulnerable place, and let it exist as intensely as I could.

As I get older, I'm more relaxed and less concerned with what people think of me