The humble person receives praise the way a clean window takes the light of the sun. The truer and more intense the light is, the less you see of the glass.
Love is not a mere emotion or sentiment. It is the lucid and ardent responses of the whole person to a value that is revealed to him as perfect.
How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all.
Our real journey in life is interior.
There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us.
Stop thinking and start looking.
Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.
The Hindus are not looking for us to send them men who will build schools and hospitals, although those things are good and useful in themselves – and perhaps very badly needed in India: they want to know if we have any saints to send them.
True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques.
The artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive of perception.
If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him.
I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to.
No matter how ruined man and his world may seem to be, and no matter how terrible man’s despair may become, as long as he continues to be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has a meaning.
In Silence God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.
We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation.
The problem today is that there are no deserts, only dude ranches.
The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives.
Love is free; it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love’s sake.
How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived.
Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.