What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all

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

Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up… now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep

Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything

I want you to be the very best version of yourself that you can be.

The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to
funerals and corpses

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can’t be said

A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beat

It’s better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way.

Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared

To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot

Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter

One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt

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

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention

We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are listening to an expanded present.

Even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.

There is no other reality than present reality.

You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here

It is in the present and only in the present that you live

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

Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present

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

You’re not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of 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

Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

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

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless

Be sensitive to each moment, regard it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive

Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences

The art of living… is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other

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

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

Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment

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

A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily

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

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

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance

Everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves

If you really understand Zen… you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because… the sound of the rain needs no translation

When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth

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

The menu is not the meal.

The more we struggle for life (as pleasure), the more we are actually killing what we love

Faith is a state of openness or trust

To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing

The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone

The destination of life is this eternal moment.

You must not be afraid of playing wrong notes. Just forget it, play it wrong! But play!

Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.

We see what we believe rather than what we see.

By going out of your mind, you come to your senses

People sometimes fail to live because they are always preparing to live.

You are the universe experiencing itself.

Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.

No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.

Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be

There is always something taboo, something repressed, un-admitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one’s eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp

Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.

There will always be suffering. But we must not suffer over the suffering

Most of us believe in order to feel secure and make our individual lives seem valuable and meaningful. Belief has thus become an attempt to hang on to life, to grasp and keep it for one’s own

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand it. To understand it you must be it.