The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
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.
You can’t live at all unless you can live fully now.
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.
Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.
When a man no longer confuses himself with the definition of himself that others have given him, he is at once universal and unique.
We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.
It’s time to question a job or career move when it seems like most energy is devoted to making things appear other than what they really are.
Nirvana is where you are, provided you don’t object to it.
Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.
We know that from time to time there arise among human beings people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.