Soyen Shaku

Watch what you say, and whatever you say, practice it.

Upon retiring, sleep as if you had entered your last sleep. Upon awakening, leave your bed behind you instantly as if you had cast away a pair of old shoes.

We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of a coarse jest, yet when you speak earnestly and seriously on the subject, is silent.

When we direct our thoughts properly, we can control our emotions…

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

Columbus discovered no isle or key so lonely as himself.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

The foundations of a person are not in matter but in spirit.

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

There is a crack in everything God has made.

One night awaits all, and death’s path must be trodden once and for all.

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.