Quotes by Zen

“Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the ri...”

“Your life is your practice. Your spiritual practice does not occur someplace other than in your life right now, and your life is nowhere other than where you are. You are looking for answers, insig...”

“When you blame, you open up a world of excuses, because as long as you're looking outside, you miss the opportunity to look inside, and you continue to suffer.”

“Courage is often associated with aggression, but instead should be seen as a willingness to act from the heart.”

“Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.”

“If one has failed to develop curiosity and interest in the early years, it is a good idea to acquire them now, before it is too late to improve the quality of life. To do so is fairly easy in princ...”

“Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing timesalthough such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have wor...”

“Happiness is simple. Everything we do to find it is complicated.”

“These examples suggest what one needs to learn to control attention. In principle any skill or discipline one can master on ones own will serve: meditation and prayer if one is so inclined; exercis...”

“Everything was insanely alive, now you see it, now you don't. I thought, it's the light, it's the water, it's changing every second, it's always doing this whether I'm here to witness it or not.”

“The sky seemed abruptly to have had enough of my dithering and dramatically lightened up around the glowing moon, which retreated like an aging sovereign before the rising sun.”

“Between the beach and the big breaking waves about a quarter mile off was a stretch of bumpy, glistening reef, its usual blanket of water pulled back by a celestial hand.”

“..Such practices and beliefs, which interfere with happiness, are neither inevitable nor necessary; they evolved by chance, as a result of random responses to accidental conditions. But once they b...”

“It might be true that it is quality time that counts, but after a certain point quantity has a bearing on quality.”

“I'm starting to think paradise isn't eternal contentment. It's more like there's something eternal about feeling contented. There's no such thing as eternal life, because you're never going to outr...”

“His hands are saying that he wants to hold her. His feet are saying that he wants to chase after her... He's probably forgotten that I'm here, beside him”

“He caught her, and he held her, and he let her cry, and cry, and cry, and he let her use his sheets to wipe her eyes, and her nose, and God knows what, because he had plenty of clean sheets, and he...”

“Hanson got to sleep with you, and I didn't, he said, his own jaw a little tight. So I stole his car.”

“Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.”

“She could not leave him hanging like this. If you were hurt, I need to know. It was a rule somewhere, in the good-guy handbook.”