"Zen is a way of liberation concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous but what is."

"We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society."

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

"The art of living... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive."

"Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver."

"What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things."

"Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body, he 'has' a body. Instead of living and loving he 'has' instincts for survival and copulation."

"In a relativistic universe you don't cling to anything, you learn to swim. And you know what swimming is - it's kind of a relaxed attitude with the water. In which you don't keep yourself afloat by holding the water, but by a certain giving to it."

"The brush must draw by itself. This cannot happen if one does not practice constantly. But neither can it happen if one makes an effort."

"I owe my solitude to other people."

"It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description."

"Buddha's doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent... this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering."

"You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you."

"You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes."

"Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way."

"In the strictest sense, we cannot actually think about life and reality at all, because this would have to include thinking about thinking, thinking about thinking about thinking, and so ad infinitum. One can only attempt a rational, descriptive philosophy of the universe on the assumption that one is totally separate from it. But if you and your thoughts are part of this universe, you cannot stand outside them to describe them."

"So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level."

"To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words- to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only through silence that one can discover something new to talk about. One who talked incessantly, without stopping to look and listen, would repeat himself ad nauseam. It is the same with thinking, which is really silent talking. It is not, by itself, open to the discovery of anything new, for its only novelties are simply arrangements of old words and ideas."

"This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play."

"Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them."

"Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated."

"Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present."

"Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior."

"Religion is not a department of life it is something that enters into the whole of it."

"So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself."

"Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know."

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

"But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us."

"No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now."

"Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure " attractively packaged but inferior in content."

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

"A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world."

"The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion."

"The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible."

"To practice with an end in view is to have one eye on the practice and the other on the end, which is lack of concentration, lack of sincerity."

"If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you'll spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don't like doing, which is stupid."

"Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality."

"You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you."

"My conscious mind must have its roots and origins in the most unfathomable depths of being, yet it feels as if it lived all by itself in this tight little skull."

"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."

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

"Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them."

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

"W might 'conquer' nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that human nature and 'outside' nature are all of a piece."

"The source of all light is in the eye."

"You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself."

"To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead."

"What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag? But you see, that's what people do."

"We might 'conquer' nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that human nature and 'outside' nature are all of a piece."

"To notice is to select, toregard some bits of perception, or some features of the world, as morenoteworthy, more significant, than others. To these we attend, and therest we ignore-for which reason conscious attention is at the same time ignorance despite the fact that it gives us a vividlyclear picture of whatever we choose to notice."