Zen Proverb

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

Still water has no mind to receive the image of the migrating geese.

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

What you possess, you lose.

Inner surrender leads to the highest truth.

The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflections. The water has no mind to receive their images.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

I dressed the part and slipped into my Sunday best. I peeled open the heavy doors to every church I could find.

To be like Christ is to be a Christian.

If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.

Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

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

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.

It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

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

The concept known as bal tashchit – ‘Do no destroy’ – has a special significance in Jewish tradition…We are constantly being warned in our faith that the capricious, thoughtless, wasteful destruction of the elements and creatures of the earth is wrong…We should remind ourselves daily of our responsibility to all aspects of creation.

A man is but the product of his thoughts; what he thinks, he becomes.

If there is any moral in Christianity, if there is anything to be learned from it, if the whole story is not profitless from first to last, it comes to this: that a man should back his own opinion against the world s.