You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.

We do not 'come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.

As the ocean 'waves', the universe 'peoples'. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature.

You are the universe expressing itself as a human for a little while.

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline.

No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

Life is a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusions.

By thoughts I mean specifically chatter in the skull: perpetual and compulsive repetition of words, of reckoning and calculating.

The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

If you cannot enjoy the present moment, you can never enjoy anything at all. For there is never any time at which you can live except the present.

Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all, unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present.

Since it is in the present and only in the present that you live, there is no other reality than present reality.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not within the power of the will.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

The primary illusion is that I am a separate, lonely center of consciousness and action, placed in a world that is not me.

You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.

You are not something that is a visitor on the earth and doesn't belong here. You are the earth.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, should consider itself a lonely outsider in this universe?

Waking up to who you are requires letting go of who you imagine yourself to be.

The self is not a thing; it is a process, an ongoing happening.

When you get the message, hang up the phone. For spiritual practices are just tools, not the living truth itself.

Security is an illusion. The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.

To breathe in, you must breathe out. To live, you must give up the clutch on life.

If you try to capture water in a bucket, it stagnates. If you let it run free in the river, it remains pure and alive.

The more you try to hold on to your life, the more elusive it becomes. It is like trying to clasp water in your hand.

The backward law: the more you strive for happiness, the further away it retreats.

When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float.

Insecurity is the very condition of life. To resist it is to resist life itself.

Human beings are simply unable to live happily without accepting the fundamental insecurity of existence.

There is no contradiction between spontaneous freedom and disciplined skill; they are the two sides of the same coin.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

The art of living does not consist in careless drifting on the one hand or in fearful clinging on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment.

Treat each moment as utterly new and unique, having no past and no future.

To be afraid of life is to be afraid of death. And to be afraid of death is to be unable to live.

Death is the indispensable companion of life, without which life would lose all its savor.

Without death, life would be like a book whose pages are endless, and therefore meaningless.

You cannot live at all, unless you can live fully now.

The sensation of 'I' is not in fact separate from the experience of 'now'.

When we open our eyes and look at the world without words, what is seen is just this: a magnificent, shimmering dance of energy.

To know reality you must look at it directly, not through the screen of symbols, words, and numbers.

Words are like signposts: they point to the city, but they are not the city.

The menu is not the meal. The map is not the territory.

Most human beings eat the menu instead of the dinner.

Money is a measure of wealth, but not wealth itself. You cannot eat dollar bills or drink gold.

Real wealth consists in having clean water, fresh air, healthy food, and good friends with whom to share them.

Don't take yourself so damn seriously. The cosmos is laughing with you, not at you.

The game of life is not a battle between good and evil; it is a play between light and shadow, which together make the picture.

Light cannot exist without darkness, nor solid without space. They go together like crest and trough of a wave.

If you realize that you cannot force yourself to be good, you will begin to understand what real goodness is.

A genuine saint never considers himself holy. He considers himself a normal human being who knows how to be himself.

The great problem of civilization is that we take the symbols for the reality.

When you listen to music, you don't listen to get to the end of the song. The point of the song is the dancing.

If the purpose of a dance were to get to a certain spot on the floor, the best dancer would be the one who got there the fastest.

In music, one does not make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played the quickest.

Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant.

The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

It is not something you do in order to get somewhere else. It is the realization that you are already there.

The water does not intend to reflect the moon, and the moon has no desire to be reflected in the water.

Wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection; the water has no mind to receive their image.

How does one achieve enlightenment? By not seeking it. For whoever seeks it assumes that he does not already have it.

You are already that which you are seeking.

The reason we do not see it is that we are looking with our eyes wide open in the wrong direction.

To put it another way: God is the most obvious thing in the world, so obvious that we look right past Him.

Nothing is more creative than death, since it is the secret of life: it means that the past must always make way for the future.

You are the music that is playing itself.

Hospitals should be arranged like night clubs: places where people go to celebrate life and heal with joy, rather than grim temples of fear.

If you make love with the idea that you are performing an exercise, you spoil it. Love must be an overflow of joy.

Love is not something that is a duty. Love is an act of total, uncalculated delight.

To love someone is to grant them the space to be completely themselves.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

The world is not a collection of objects, but a communion of subjects.

We do not need to invent meaning; we are meaning. Every leaf, every bug, every cloud is an answer to a question no one needed to ask.

When you get into a cloud, you find that there is nothing to grasp. Life is cloud-like: soft, billowy, and ungraspable.

Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown: that is the true address of the sage.

The clouds in the sky do not worry about where they are going. They go where the wind takes them, and in doing so, they water the earth.

If you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water.

There are no mistakes in nature. There are only events.

When you listen to the birds singing, do you ask what they mean? The song of the bird is its own meaning.

The purpose of the eye is to see; the purpose of the flower is to bloom; the purpose of your life is simply to be.

To live without comparison is to discover the infinite richness of what is right in front of you.

The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there.

If you want to understand the universe, listen to the silence beneath the noise.

Silence is the great canvas on which the music of existence is painted.

The more you give up control, the more power you have. Real power is the power of yielding, like water.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure.

He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing.

To himself he always appears to be doing both.

You cannot touch the world without the world touching you in return.

We are all floating on an ocean of boundless grace, but we behave like paupers terrified of drowning in a teacup.

Relax into the current. The river knows the way to the sea.

The root of all human anxiety is the attempt to hold your breath indefinitely.

Let go, and you find that the universe catches you every single time.

You are the eyes through which the cosmos gazes upon its own glory.

You are the ears through which the universe listens to its own harmony.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

There is no rush, nowhere else you need to be. Just breathe, and be here.

You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.

This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

What you seek is seeking you.

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.