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

The Chinese word Li may therefore be understood as organic order, as distinct from mechanical or legal order, both of which go by the book. Li is the asymmetrical, nonrepetitive, and unregimented order which we find in the patterns of moving water, the form of trees and clouds, of frost crystals on the window, or the scattering of pebbles on beach sand.

To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.

Courage is the goal of cowards.

What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.

Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other. Forever.

The whole point of Zen is to suspend the rules we have superimposed on things and to see the world as it is