Simply by sailing in a new direction / You could enlarge the world.

Several excuses are always less convincing than one.

In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.

In art and dream, may you proceed with abandon. In life, may you proceed with balance and stealth.

What an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile attempt to reacapture the comforts that you wouldn’t have lost if you hadn’t left home in the first place.

The most precious inheritance that parents can give their children is their own happiness. Our parents may be able to leave us money, houses, and land, but they may not be happy people. If we have happy parents, we have received the richest inheritance of all.

If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

I sit before flowers, hoping they will train me in the art of opening up.

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover…

Stop searching for phrases and chasing after words. Take the backward step and turn the light inward. Your body mind of itself will drop off and your original face will appear. If you want to attain just this, immediately practice just this.

You only live once and, usually, not even then.

Be, and at the same time, not be. To be or not to be, but then, to be and not to be. Both at the same time. The best thing is to be living, and yet not living. Dying and yet not dying. That is the object of Zen discipline.

The test of beauty is whether it can survive close knowledge.

Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

The teachers are everywhere. What is wanted is a learner. / In ignorance is hope. If we had known the difficulty, we would not have learned so little. / Rely on ignorance. It is ignorance the teachers will come to. / They are waiting, as they always have, beyond the edge of the light.

True emptiness is before thinking. Before thinking is like this. Form is form, emptiness is emptiness. So your don’t know mind is true emptiness, is before thinking, is the absolute, is your true self.

The universe is made of stories, not atoms.

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

The world, I believe, is far too serious, and being far too serious, it has need of a wise and merry philosophy.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning.

It is good to know the truth, but it is better to speak of the palm trees.

Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced…

When a library is open, no matter its size or shape, democracy is open, too.

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to…

Just because something “happens,” because it is “true,” because the “facts” are correct, does not ensure that it is the truth.

What is your life about, anyway? Nothing but a struggle to be someone. Nothing but a running from your own silence.

At present, the outer universe—earth, stones, mountains, rocks, and cliffs—seems to the perception of our senses to be permanent and stable, like the house built of reinforced concrete which we think will last for generations. In fact, there is nothing solid to it at all; it is nothing but a city of dreams.