Zen Proverb

Before enlightnment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightnment, chop wood, carry water.

When an ordinary man attains knowledge, he is a sage; when a sage attains understanding, he is an ordinary man.

Inner surrender leads to the highest truth.

Don’t worry that you won’t attain oneness. Work on it!

Only when you can be extremely pliable and soft can you be extremely hard and strong.

When you hear that all beings are Buddha, don’t fall into the error of thinking there’s more than one Buddha.

Our God is a forgiving God.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

Be the witness of your thoughts. You are what observes, not what you observe.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

Buddhist practice is simply a system directed to the one end of lessening the suffering of life.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

The ordinary mind is the way.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

The instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

I think every person should have some faith inside him, in his heart. What matters is not an external display of this faith, but the inner state of the soul.

Harmonizing opposites by going back to their source is the distinctive quality of the Zen attitude, the Middle Way: embracing contradictions, making a synthesis of them, achieving balance.

If you want to climb a mountain, begin at the top.

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

I believe a man is better anchored who has a belief in the Supreme Being.