"The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present."

"And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning."

"This-the immediate everyday and present experience-is IT the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe."

"And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment."

"Wars based on principle are far more destructive... the attacker will not destroy that which he is after."

"This is not a philosophy of not looking where one is going, it is a philosophy of not making where one is going so much more important than where one is that there will be no point in going."

"Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe."

"Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick."

"Faith is above all openness an act of trust in the unknown."

"Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them."

"In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean."

"Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead."

"For our radically misnamed "materialistic civilization must above all cultivate the love of material, of earth, air, and water, of mountains and forests, of excellent food and imaginative housing and clothing, and of cherishing our artfully erotic contacts between human bodies. Certainly, all these so"called "things are as impermanent as ripples in water, but what life, what love, what energy is there in a perfectly pure abstraction or a totally solid and eternally indestructible rock?"

"Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command."

"Discord on one level is harmony on another."

"I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is."

"Camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question, which is whether or not to commit suicide. I think there are four or five serious philosophical questions:The first one is: Who started it?The second is: Are we going to make it?The third is: Where are we going to put it?The fourth is: Who's going to clean up?And the fifth: Is it serious?Out Of Your Mind (2004), Audio lecture 1: The Nature of Consciousness: A Game That's Worth The Candle."

"But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be."

"In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all."

"Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command."

"Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment."

"Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence."

"It is fundamental to both Taoist and Confucian thought that the natural man is to be trusted, and from their standpoint it appears that the Western mistrust of human nature-whether theological or technological-is a kind of schizophrenia. It would be impossible, in their view, to believe oneself innately evil without discrediting the very belief, since all the notions of a perverted mind would be perverted notions."

"The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile."

"We fail so easily to see the difference between fear of the unknown and respect for the unknown, thinking that those who do not hasten in with bright lights and knives are deterred by a holy and superstitious fear. Respect for the unknown is the attitude of those who, instead of raping nature, woo her until she gives herself. But what she gives, even then, is not the cold clarity of the surface but the warm inwardness of the body - a mysteriousness which is not merely a negation, a blank absence of knowledge, but that positive substance which we call wonderfull."

"There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know."

"If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself " not as a stranger in the world, not as something here unprobational, not as something that has arrived here by fluke - but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental."

"Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of "instinctual wisdom." Thus it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the foetus in the womb - without verbalizing the process of knowing "how" it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between "I" and my experience."

"God is the Self of the world, but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because it is God hiding."

"The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe."

"You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean."

"Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so."

"And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born."

"In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself."

"When you find out that there was never anything in the dark side to be afraid of. Nothing is left but to love."

"The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention."

"And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on."

"Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes."

"But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is."

"If we live we live if we die we die if we suffer we suffer if we are terrified we are terrified. There is no problem about it."

"For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end."

"Saints need sinners."

"Money alone cannot buy pleasure, though it can help. For enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy."

"I owe my solitude to other people."

"The menu is not the meal."

"There are various levels above and below the human through which the individual soul may pass in the course of its reincarnations-the angelic, the titanic, the animal, the purgatories, and the realm of the frustrated ghosts."

"To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float."

"No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now."

"Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations."

"But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything."