Not to be bound by rules, but to be creating one's own rules-this is the kind of life which Zen is trying to have us live.

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.

At the core of the heart of an atheist is a heart that doesn't deny the existence, sovereignty and power of God but it chooses deliberately not to believe it for a long while.

I don't think I'm easy, but I think I'm quite a good worker.

It is long and hard and painful to create life: it is short and easy to steal the life others have made.

It's not sincereity, it is truth which frees us, because it transforms us. It tears us away from our inmost slavery.

Revenge is fruitless.

Cynicism is no more mature than naïveté. You're no more mature, just more burned.

Calvin was virtually the founder of America.

So much of life was the peeling away of illusions.