To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.

Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat's entrails with horsehair.

Although profoundly "inconsequential," the Zen experience has consequences in the sense that it may be applied in any direction, to any conceivable human activity, and that wherever it is so applied it lends an unmistakable quality to the work.

I owe my solitude to other people.

The individual may be understood as one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself - as an incarnation of the self, or of the Godhead, or whatever one may choose to call it.

If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

Do not let the rapidity with which these thoughts can change deceive you into feeling that you think them all at once.