The importance and unimportance of the self cannot be exaggerated.

If all men lead mechanical, unpoetical lives, this is the real nihilism, the real undoing of the world.

The object of our lives is to look at, listen to, touch, taste things. Without them, - these sticks, stones, feathers, shells, - there is no Deity.

There is no greater difference between men than between grateful and ungrateful people.

Nothing divides one so much as thought.

Think of Zen, of the Void, of Good and Evil and you are bound hand and foot. Think only and entirely and completely of what you are doing at the moment and you are free as a bird.

A haiku is the expression of a temporary enlightenment, in which we see into the life of things.

I myself think that to have a cat is more important than to have a Bible.

Zen is the unsymbolization of the world.

What is essential is not the answer but the questions; the answers indeed are the death of the life that is in the questions.

The love of nature is religion, and that religion is poetry; these three things are one thing. This is the unspoken creed of haiku poets.

Stop giving people the power to control your smile, your worth, your attitude and your day. Don’t give anyone that much power over your life.

If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing

Endings and beginnings look just the same.

Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.

Sweetest li'l feller everybody knows Dunno what to call him but he's mighty lak' a rose Lookin' at his mammy wid eyes so shiny blue Mek' you think that Heav'n is comin' clost ter you.

If only someone had told me about the confidence-boosting nature of guns, I’d have been shooting them all my life.

I cannot express it: but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you.

Money! They go together. Franchise; money. Money; franchise.

Worry is an addiction that interferes with compassion.

Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy, affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly; the one completes a villain, the other only finishes a fop.