It must be obvious...that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.

Leave your front door and your back door open. Allow your thoughts to come and go. Just don't serve them tea.

When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.

Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble. You yourself make the waves in your mind. If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm. This mind is called big mind.

Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.

If you can just appreciate each thing, one by one, then you will have pure gratitude. Even though you observe just one flower, that one flower includes everything

The most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your two feet.

Wherever you go you will find your teacher, as long as you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.

When my master and I were walking in the rain, he would say, 'Do not walk so fast, the rain is everywhere.'

Instead of criticizing, find out how to help.

If you place your head in a lion's mouth, then you cannot complain one day if he happens to bite it off.

Only the debris of wreckage, and not much of that, was left behind by the sharks who fed on tragedy: the fishermen, too, mourned the death of a living child.

God knows I'm no the thing I should be Nor am I even the thing I could be.

Necessity knows no law.

Nobody will ever love you quite the way you want them to. You just have to let them do their best.

Individuals achieve optimal stupidity when they're given substantial powers while being insulated from the results of their actions.

The Lord uses his flail of tribulation to separate the chaff from the wheat.

So all the rest is O.K., but fame is a hollow ground, isn't it? It's an empty kind of thing.

I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.

Do you know that people fall in love in war and go to school and go to factories and hospitals and get divorced and go dancing and go playing and live life?