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.
Real practice has no purpose or direction, so it can include everything that comes.
Preparing food is not just about yourself and others. It is about everything!
When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.
Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine. – Shunryu Suzuki
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.
Events tend to recur in cycles.
Knowledge is more than equivalent to force.
Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.
Surely life, if it be not long, is tedious, since we are forced to call in the assistance of so many trifles to rid us of our time, of that time which never can return.
If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.
Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff.
Life will not bear refinement. You must do as other people do.
The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.
Adversity is the state in which man mostly easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.
We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.
It is a happy talent to know how to play.
All those moments are alive in us today. We may not visit them anymore, very often, but we carry them in our DNA, our blood, our bones; informing the breadth and beauty of who we now are; our lesson to be lived.
I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.
It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.
I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.
