Most assuredly Zen is a religion, but it is a religion without scripture, without doctrine or dogma and without sin.

I am a man of peace [so he told Mother, but it always appeared to me that he was the most belligerent man of peace I had ever encountered]

Either you get a chance to be a kid when you are a kid, or you don't grow up.

A mountain still in the distance can appear as a molehill.

The dignity is in the worker, not in the job.

Only people who suffer show the ravages of age.

Yiddish for gall, nerve, arrogance-whatever

And finally, be assured that Zen asks nothing even as it promises nothing. One can be a Protestant Zen Buddhist, a Catholic Zen Buddhist or a Jewish Zen Buddhist. Zen is a quiet thing. It listens.

A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. He watches it, but he knows he can't do it. Critics very often are failed writers and, like failed priests, they hate religion.

The vastness of possibilities in space reminded me that while my life felt important, it was tiny in the scheme of things. Human civilization was only a blink on the radar of time.

Life is the great teacher.

There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.

Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.

As the snake is separate from its slough, even so is the Spirit separate from the body.

I hadn't seen my dad get violent since the Great Spatula Incident, and I wasn't anxious to see a repeat of that.

This has resulted in more and more people becoming inner-directed and having as their only goal, getting as much as they can get out of the system and putting as little into it as possible

I have need to busy my heart with quietude.

Any time things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.

When you start to analyze [rock 'n' roll], it's only because you don't understand it. You're just not connecting with it once you have to start analyzing it.