This is what Zen means by being detached—not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.

The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.

There is no way of making a hedge grow like pruning it. There is no way of making sex interesting like repressing it.

We are all as much extraordinary phenomena of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars and the form of a galaxy.

Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.

The mind's the standard of the man.