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.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.
Some people look for a beautiful place, others make a place beautiful.
What will survive of us is love.
A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
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.
Life should be lived to the point of tears.
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.