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

The difference between a baby and adult is that a baby believes in everything while the adult doubts everything. Babies also only tell the truth until they learn what a lie is.

For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.

Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.

The sound of the rain needs no translation.

...the whole universe is through and through the playing of love in every shade of the word's use, from animal lust to divine charity.

Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force.

We all need to go out of our minds at least once a day. When we go out of our minds we quickly come to our senses.

You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.

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

Now, you see, if you understand what I'm saying, with your intelligence, and then take the next step and say "But I understood it now, but I didn't feel it." Then, next I raise the question: Why do you want to feel it? You say: "I want something more", because that's again that spiritual greed. And you could only say that because you didn't understand it.

Think about a piece of music - some great symphony - we don't expect it to get better as it develops, or that its whole purpose is to reach the final crescendo. The joy is found in listening to the music in each moment.

Our normal sense of the person as a lonely island of consciousness, is a dramatic illusion based on theological imagery.

The idea of the Universe being ruled by that marvelous old gentleman, is no longer plausible. It isn't that anybody has disproved it, but it just somehow doesn't go with the vast infinitude of the Universe.

Everything is perpetually becoming new.

Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—to the “conquest”

We usually don't look. We overlook.

The animal tends to eat with his stomach, and the man with his brain. When the animal's stomach is full, he stops eating, but the man is never sure when to stop. When he has eaten as much as his belly can take, he still feels empty, he still feels an urge for further gratification.

Of course, you can’t force your mind to be silent. That would be like trying to smooth ripples in water with a flatiron. Water becomes clear and calm only when left alone.

The anitya doctrine is, again, not quite the simple assertion that the world is impermanent, but rather that the more one grasps at the world, the more it changes.

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.

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

The Highest to which people can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes them wonder, let them be content; nothing higher can it give them, and nothing further should they seek for behind it; there is the limit.