“Awareness is our true self; its what we are. So we dont have to try to develop awareness; we simply need to notice how we block awareness, with our thoughts, our fantasies, our opinions, and our ju...”

“103When we try to be something that we are not, we become the slave of a rigid, fixed mind, following a rule about how things have to be. The violence and the anger in us remain unnoticed, because ...”

“When I watch my mind and stay with my body, out of that comes some course of action.”

“When we refuse to work with our disappointment, we break the Precepts: rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it's the moment of being that dis...”

“If from morning to night we just took care of one thing after another, thoroughly and completely and without accompanying thoughts, such as Im a good person for doing this or Isnt it wonderful, tha...”

“When we seek from Zen (or from any spiritual path) the fulfillment of our fantasies, we separate from the earth and sky, from our loved ones, from our aching backs and hearts, from the very soles o...”

“Dont let a day go by without asking who you areeach time you let a new ingredient to enter your awareness.”

“We all have an inner voice, our personal whisper from the universe. All we have to do is listen -- feel and sense it with an open heart. Sometimes it whispers of intuition or precognition. Other ti...”

“Going beyond thoughts is merely to reduce the multiplicity of your thought.Thoughts lead to words, words to language, language to action. Action to realization, and back again to thoughts.For the m...”

“Sibyl, what do you want?I want to live, the Sibyl said, and her voice rang rich and full. I want to keep on living forever and watching heroes and fools and knights go up and down, into the world a...”

“When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the suspension of disbelief and activity of the imagination that ...”

“When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it.”

“I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.”

“To love somebody is not just a strong feeling -- it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise," writes psychologist Erich Fromm. "If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the...”

“You must first of all think justly. Dont sit in judgment over others when you dont know the truth of the matter.”