We’re all just walking each other home.

If you’re not a Buddhist, you think there are Buddhists and non Buddhists, but if you’re a Buddhist you realize that everybody is a Buddhist—even the bugs.

I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said, “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…

The English language is an arsenal of weapons; if you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or not they are loaded you must expect to have them exploding your face from time to time.

We are all so deeply interconnected; we have no options but to love all. Be kind and do good for anyone, and that will be reflected. The ripples of your kind heart are the highest blessings to the universe.

Becoming “awake” involves seeing our confusion more clearly.

Do not despise your inner world.

From pain comes strength. / From the negative comes the positive. / Relish in this strength. Nurture it. / It will take you through the great fire. / It will pull you up to the high path.

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.

Intellect takes you to the door, but it doesn’t take you into the house.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

Life is too short for grief. Or regret. Or bullshit.

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. To gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have—positively—a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang—there is no getting…

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you.

As long as you’re fascinated and as long as you keep on fighting the things you think are wrong, you’re living. It isn’t the evil people in the world who do the most harm. It’s the sweet do nothings that can destroy us.

A master was about to address the assembly of monks. Just then a bird in a nearby tree began to sing. The master remained silent until the bird stopped singing, and then announced that his address was finished and walked away.

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word clogged reality by creating silences around things.

Heaven and earth and myself and the Ten Thousand Things are of one root.

The boundaries between you and not you—what lies beyond your skin—relax and become more permeable. While infused with love you see fewer distinctions between you and others. Indeed, your ability to see others—really see them, wholeheartedly—springs open.

Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, not to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.

The quieter you become, the more you can hear.

What’s the world for if you can’t make it up the way you want it?

There is no “must” in art because art is free.

A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is, at the same time, beginning to awaken to deeper realities, truer realities. For suffering smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality, and forces us to come alive in a special sense—to see carefully, to feel deeply, to touch ourselves…

The silence was enchanting. Infinite space seemed to enter it, and my spirit, alone with the stars, seemed capable of any adventure.

The basic principle of spiritual life is that our problems become the very place to discover wisdom and love.

Truth seems to come with its final word; and the final word gives birth to its next.