There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Thinking should become your capital asset, no matter whatever ups and downs you come across in your life.
Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion.
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. 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.
Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.
That’s a waste of time. 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.
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.
Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.
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.
Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.
Vulnerability is not about winning, and it’s not about losing. It’s about having the courage to show up and be seen.