Zazen practice and everyday activity are one thing. We call zazen everyday life, and everyday life zazen.

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.'

Many are concerned with going to heaven or hell, But fail to realize that you can be living in heaven or hell right here on Earth.

As I create I become.

Maybe it's just easier to hold onto resentment and bitterness.But when you hold onto them, you're imprisoning yourself, not the other person. Not forgiving is pretty heavy baggage to carry around.

Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?

I think slavery is wrong, morally, and politically. I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union.

The purpose of God isn't to save us from Hell. The purpose of God is to make us like Christ.

An old African leader says about leadership, he says that leadership should never be shared; it should always remain in the hands of the dispossessed people. We will lead the revolution.

The first assistant director is just so important that the choice of that person is critical to the movie.

Newspapers have become more important to the average man than the scriptures.

God put me on this earth to be a tool.