The world is its own magic.
To accept some idea of truth without experiencing it is like a painting of a cake on paper which you can not eat.
When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.
Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine. – Shunryu Suzuki
Preparing food is not just about yourself and others. It is about everything!
Real practice has no purpose or direction, so it can include everything that comes.
Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing –a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.
Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged, must end in disappointment. If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason, but by desire; expectation raised, not by the common occurrences of life, but by the wants of the expectant; an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken.
Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable.
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.
The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.
He shines in the second rank, who is eclipsed in the first.
I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.
The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.
No matter how carefully you plan your goals they will never be more than pipe dreams unless you pursue them with gusto.
So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.
The truest end of life is to know that life never ends.
Usually the modest person passes for someone reserved, the silent for a sullen person.
Nature hates calculators.
The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?
