Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary. You can feel that you are breathing, and equally you can feel that it is breathing you. So it is a sort of bridge between the voluntary world and the involuntary world — a place where they are one.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.

A philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.

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

We tend to regard ourselves as puppets of the Past, driven along by something that is always behind us.

The police have enough work to keep them busy regulating automobile traffic, preventing robberies and crimes of violence and helping lost children and little old ladies find their way home. As long as the police confine themselves to such activities they are respected friends of the public. But as soon as they begin inquiring into people's private morals, they become nothing more than armed clergymen.