Life without zazen is like winding your clock without setting it. It runs perfectly well, but it dosen't tell time.

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.'

Without a good plan, you might fall short of reaching your dreams and goals.

You darling is my semicolon.

Moonlight is sculpture.

The future is deterministic in principle, but not in practice.

I try to be more goofy when I'm on set now that I'm more comfortable. In real life, I'm so goofy and super weird. I'm never mean but people don't see the weird side of me.

Marriage has got historic, religious and moral content that goes back to the beginning of time and I think a marriage is as a marriage has always been, between a man and a woman.

Life is never what it seems - and that’s the great thing about it

Even the best community organizations and faith-based initiatives and the extraordinary charity of Americans across the country can't carry the brunt of eliminating poverty.

Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.

The natural cause of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.