Zen Quotes

We find what's in our own heads.

…one lives and analyses data within a frame, unaware that the solution is most often just outside of that frame. Never underestimate the depth of your subjectivity.

Nature has a healing power that teaches us that we are a part of a larger world.

Reach out to the world. Be open. Help others and in doing so help yourself.

When something comes from within, when it is a part of you, you have no choice but to live it, to express it.

Life is a river, " a wise friend told me. "It's flowing. You're never at the same place twice.

Yes, you are creative and in slow, languid times, creativity peers out of your soul like a field mouse from its burrow at night.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.The more you look the more you see.

Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you.

Well-being, or wholeness, implies integrity and harmony between all existing elements, providing freedom for the whole.

Getting down to the gym a couple days a week and having low-fat milk in your morning latte isn’t going to make much of a dent in a system or lifestyle that is essentially, well, unwell.

Appreciation, affection, focus and intention fill up the space of self-reflection, and one loses oneself in the engagement. And what a relief it is when you get there.

The nature of yearning is urgent so as to guarantee evolution, change.

The essential war within, and the cause of suffering, begins with the presumption that yearning, impulse and curiosity, desire and question, exist so as to end them. To attain, to acquire, to answer.

The subjective experience of intense pain (“That’s all I can take”) corresponds exactly to one’s subjective experience in relation to truth (“That’s all I can take”).

By its nature, what you yearn for is most often intimidating. It produces, and itself is, a question, and one that is not easy to engage or answer.

My intention is not to define a perfect life and then cause an unhappy analysis of what you are not doing correctly or are incapable of doing.

If you are “playing” too much or “working” too much, you will have a reaction on the other side, which indicates your pace is off, too slow or too fast.

Sometimes I wonder how much of our suffering we allow or impose on ourselves simply in search of our worthiness to accept our own respect and appreciation.

The exact proportion and combination of the qualities within you, as they are, even while you search and struggle for them to be different or better, is a unique beauty.

In making a clear distinction between desire (answer) and yearning (question), we inevitably end up back at personal purpose.

What you have to do to achieve what you want necessitates the creative actualization of the totality of your being as it is. Nothing more, but also nothing less.

The challenges are illusions, but necessary ones to determine if you can see through them.

What is at the base of shame or guilt? It is the consciousness of an imbalance, or of an action in the past that has caused, and probably continues to cause, suffering.

If you know what life really wants, and if you know what you really want, you can begin to create the relationship.

Transformation, on the other hand, is creating beauty from horror or destruction (or, for beginners, an actually pleasant evening with the usual family problems).

I think that as a species we’ve played at being the self-indulgent, spoiled adolescent way too long, and now there are permanent damages and absolute risks that most people are ignoring.

Through the realization of the potentials and possibilities within and outside of you, one connects imagination with reality. What could be becomes so.

The purest definition of “religious” is: relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality.

We do have some capacity to determine how things evolve, and how we evolve, individually and as a community or race. That’s a tremendous freedom and a tremendous responsibility.

If you don’t practice presence, you never learn how to have busyness facilitate accomplishment.

it's always good to know that you have been the best even though deep inside you know you will never be better than that.

We don't teach flowers to bloom

Meditation is a secular practice, not a religious practice.

Keep Calm and Find Your Zen-ity

Zen is the purest of meditations: just sit silently, doing nothing.

In zazen, leave your front door and your back door open. Let thoughts come and go. Just don't serve them tea.

Life is eternal game, there are no rules. Indulge yourself.

Zen movement is a meditative practice.

Search not for happiness outside yourself, for nothing could be further from the truth.

The awareness that seeks to know is the very object of its own seeking.

The way is not clear, and it is when you do not have clarity, when this is allowed, that you will finally have clarity.

Can you allow yourself to be impaled on the present moment?

Maybe it’s something which can’t be defined, ” Enso Roshi says. “Maybe it’s a question, to be lived.

The mind is limitless, in its creations.

Let whatever happens, be what needs to happen, so that I may awaken.

Nothing needs to be done, and things get done.

The glass is neither half empty, nor half full. The glass is just a glass and it's content can perpetually change with your perception.

The most expected thing you can expect is what's unexpected.

Mindfulness helps you understand that the past is gone, can’t be changed and all the lessons are already learned.