Dogen Zenji

[on enlightenment] Body and mind dropped off.

To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened by all things.

I come to realize that mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and stars.

To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to forget ourselves.

If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?

You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.

O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.

It’s not about approving or liking, but just being able to allow the world to be the way it is without resenting, hating, or judging it.

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.

Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.

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.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others is the ultimate source of success in life.

Zen has no business with ideas.

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

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

Do not worship me, I am not God. I’m only a man. I worship Jesus Christ.

You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.

God, grant us our desires, and grant them quickly.

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion – several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven.