73 quotes found
“A walk with a two-year-old is very Zen; it is not about the end but the journey. He needs to pet the dog someone is walking; to roll down the slight incline to the church basement, and then roll ag...”
“Not being tense but ready.Not thinking but not dreaming.Not being set but flexible.Liberation from the uneasy sense of confinement.It is being wholly and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for w...”
“...it's like this. Sometimes, when you've a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly long it is and feel sure you'll never get it swept. And then you start to hurry. You work faster an...”
“Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master, and nobody had noticed. Still, i'm doing the little FAX thing. I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around...”
“Zen probably won’t solve a single one of our problems. What it might do is help us relate differently to what we consider problems.”
“[W]e have endless opportunities to forget the self – in planting a tree for future generations; in creating a poem, a meal, a vessel of clay;”
“Truth is not … something to believe or disbelieve. The things we believe are always less than Truth[.]”
“And the question of Wester religion,” Flattery said, “is: What lies beyond death? But the question of the Zen master is: What lies beyond waking?”
“There's nothing you can find - … nothing you can even imagine – that doesn't originate, develop, or exist in relation to other things.”
“For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.”
“[I]t would seem that to be incapable of sitting and watching with the mind completely at rest is to be incapable of experiencing the world in which we live to the full. For one does not know the wo...”
“[I]t is typical of Zen that its style of action has the strongest feeling of commitment, of "follow-through." It enters into everything wholeheartedly and freely without having to keep an eye on it...”
“One master defines Zen as the art of feeling the polar star in the southern sky. Truth can be reached only through the comprehension of opposites.”
