ZEN

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

Baba Ram Dass

At times I think and at times I am.

Paul Valery

Think enough and you won't know anything.

Kenneth Patchen

We know too much and feel too little.

Bertrand Russell

The truth of a thing is the feel of it, not the think of it.

Stanley Kubrick

The one is none other than the All,
the All none other than the One.

Seng Ts'an



All know that the drop merges into the ocean
but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.

Kabir

When you seek it, you cannot find it.

Zen Saying

Tomorrow's life is too late. Live today.

Martial



Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Albert Einstein

We are here and it is now. Further than
that all human knowledge is moonshine.

H. L. Mencken


Life is not a problem to be solved
but a reality to be experienced.

Kierkegaard

If you walk, just walk. If you sit, just sit;
but whatever you do, don't wobble.

Ummon

Nature is not anthropomorphic.

Lao Tzu

Words, as is well known, are great foes of reality.

Joseph Conrad

Man, if you gotta ask, you'll never know.

Louis Armstrong (asked to define jazz)

Life happens too fast for you to ever think about it.
If you could just persuade people of this,
but they insist on amassing information.

Kurt Vonnegut

The Way that can be told is not the eternal way.

Lao Tzu

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim,
no meaning, and yet I'm happy.
I can't figure it out.
What am I doing right?

Charles M. Schulz


The truth knocks on the door and you say,
"Go away, I'm looking for the truth,"
and so it goes away. Puzzling.

Robert Pirsig

We should take care not to make the intellect our god;
it has, of course, powerful muscles, but
no personality.

Albert Einstein

I don't know. I don't care.
And it doesn't make any difference.

Jack Kerouac

To understand is almost the opposite of existing.

Georges Poulet

Thinking doesn't seem to help very much.
The human brain is too high-powered to have
many practical uses in this particular universe.

Kurt Vonnegut

Zen has no business with ideas.

D.T. Suzuki

Beware lest you lose the substance
by grasping at the shadow.

Saint-Exupery

Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.

Saint-Exupery

A great deal of intelligence can be invested
in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

Saul Bellow

Physical concepts are free creations of the
human mind, and are not, however it may seem,
uniquely determined by the external world.

Albert Einstein

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

Elizabeth Bowen

There is no cure for birth and death,
save to enjoy the interval.

Santayana

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Little we see in nature that is ours.
We have given our hearts away.

Wordsworth

To realize the unimportance of time
is the gate of wisdom.

Bertrand Russell

If you are not happy here and now, you never will be.

Taisen Deshimaru

I have realized that the past and the future are
real illusions, that they exist only in the present,
which is what there is and all that there is.

Alan Watts

To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.

Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Knowledge is one. Its division into subjects
is a concession to human weakness.

Sir Halford John Mackinder

The highest wisdom has but one science -
the science of the whole - the science explaining
the whole creation and man's place in it.

Tolstoy



When you do something,
you should burn yourself completely,
like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.

Shunryu Suzuki

No thought, no reflection, no analysis, no cultivation,
no intention; let it settle itself.

~ Tilopa ~



When you pass through, no one can pin you down,
no one can call you back.

~ Ying-An ~



Flow with whatever may happen and
let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting
whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.

Chuang Tzu

It is the familiar that usually eludes us in life.
What is before our nose is what we see last.

William Barrett

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues
his journey long and unflinchingly enough,
ends in the obvious, from which the
nonintellectuals have never stirred.

Aldous Huxley

All that shimmers on the surface of the world,
all that we call interesting, is the fruit of
inebriation and ignorance.

E.M. Cioran

Put your heart, mind, intellect and
soul even to your smallest acts.
This is the secret of success.

Swami Sivananda

Intelligence is silence, truth being invisible.
But what a racket I make in declaring this.

Ned Rorem

Not only has one to do one's best, one must,
while doing one's best, remain detached
from whatever one is trying to achieve.

Janwillem Van de Wetering

The clearest way into the universe is
through a forest wilderness.

John Muir

To the dull mind nature is leaden.
To the illumined mind the whole world
burns and sparkles with light.

Emerson

Many men go fishing all of their lives without
knowing that it is not fish they are after.

Thoreau

We do not err because truth is difficult to see.
It is visible at a glance. We err because this is
more comfortable.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Learn how to be entirely unreceptive to sensations
arising from external forms, thereby purging
your bodies of receptivity to externals.

Huang Po

Nobody today is normal, everybody is a little bit crazy or
unbalanced, people's minds are running all the time.
Their perceptions of the world are partial, incomplete.
They are eaten alive by their egos.
They think they see, but they are mistaken;
all they do is project their madness,
their world, upon the world.
there is no clarity, no wisdom in that!

Taisen Deshimaru

Zen functions in non-duality.
The process of thought, of reasoning,
takes place in the field of duality.
It follows that no thinking will achieve Zen.

Christmas Humphreys

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect;
a haphazardly selective memory; a set of
preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that
I can never examine more than a minority of them
- never become even conscious of them all.
How much of total reality can such an
apparatus let through?

C. S. Lewis

Keep your hands open, and all the sands of
the desert can pass through them.
Close them, and all you can feel
is a bit of grit.

Taisen Deshimaru

All the masters tell us that the reality of life
- which our noisy waking consciousness prevents
us from hearing - speaks to us chiefly in silence.

Karlfried Graf Durckheim

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort
as possible and without desire. The reality
of your own nature should determine the speed.
If you become restless, speed up.
If you become winded, slow down.
You climb the mountain in an equilibrium
between restlessness and exhaustion.
Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead,
each footstep isn't just a means to an end
but a unique event in itself.

Robert Pirsig

It's the nothing that makes us something,
it's what we miss that hits the mark.

7-Up Jingle

I searched through rebellion, drugs, diets, mysticism,
religions, intellectualism, and much more,
only to begin to find . . . that truth is basically simple
- and feels good, clean and right.

Chick Corea

It's very nice to feel. You're nothing.
You're just nothing when you're near a volcano.

Katia Krafft

We cannot put off living until we are ready.
The most salient characteristic of life is its
coerciveness: it is always urgent, "here and now"
without any possible postponement.
Life is fired at us point-blank.

Jose Ortega Y Gasset

If one is master of one thing and understands
one thing well, one has at the same time, insight
into and understanding of many things.

Vincent Van Gogh

There is no reality except the one contained within us.
That is why so many people live such an unreal life.
They take the images outside them for reality
and never allow the world to assert itself.

Hermann Hesse

People love chopping wood.
In this activity one immediately sees results.

Albert Einstein

Any intellectually conceived object is always
in the past and therefore unreal.
Reality is always the moment of vision
before the intellectualization takes place.
There is no other reality.

Robert Pirsig

What we call reality is an agreement that
people have arrived at to make life more livable.

Louise Nevelson

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality,
they are not certain; as far as they are
certain, they do not refer to reality.

Albert Einstein

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

T. S. Eliot

You do not need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait.
Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you
to be unmasked, it has no choice,
it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Franz Kafka

Meditation is not a means to an end.
It is both the means and the end.

Krishnamurti

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

T.S. Eliot

In zazen, one is one's present self,
what one was, and what one will be, all at once.

Peter Matthiessen

If you have a glass full of liquid you can discourse forever
on its qualities, discuss whether it is cold, warm,
whether it is really and truly composed of H2O,
or mineral water, or saki.
Zazen is drinking it.

Taisen Deshimaru

No thought, no action, no movement, total stillness:
only thus can one manifest the true nature and
law of things from within and unconsciously,
and at last become one with heaven and earth.

Lao Tzu

Nature is what she is - amoral and persistent.

Stephen Jay Gould

Hope and fear cannot alter the seasons.

Chogyam Trungpa



If there is a sin against life, it consists
perhaps not so much in despairing of life
as in hoping for another life and in eluding
the implacable grandeur of this life.

Albert Camus

It is inner abandonment that leads men
to the highest truth.

Henry Suso

I am in the present.
I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth.
I can know only what the truth is for me today.
That is what I am called upon to serve,
and I serve it in all lucidity.

Igor Stravinsky

We can only exist by taking our minds off
the fact that we exist.

Thomas Bernhard

In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is
to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

Robert Louis Stevenson



How should men know what is coming to pass
within them, when there are no words to grasp it?
How could the drops of water know themselves
to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

Saint-Exupery

From your first day at school you are cut off
from life to make theories.

Taisen Deshimaru

We are born princes and the civilizing process
makes us frogs.

Eric Berne