No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.
Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist.
True happiness is not found in any other reward than that of being united with God. If I seek some other reward besides God Himself, I may get my reward but I cannot be happy.
The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.
The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.
As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination.
Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.
The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done.
To worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell.
In the devil’s theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong.
Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God.
To be alone by being part of the universe-fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without.
It might be good to open our eyes and see.
You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt.
His justice is the love that gives to each one of His creatures the gifts that His mercy has previously decreed. And His mercy is His love, doing justice to its own exigencies, and renewing the gift which we had failed to accept.
The man who lives in division is living in death. He cannot find himself because he is lost; he has ceased to be a reality. The person he believes himself to be is a bad dream.
And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey.
There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another’s solitude.
When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children.
If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is “just glass.”