When we look for things there is nothing but mind, and when we look for mind there is nothing but things.

And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.

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

There is a peculiar contradiction in trying to be a member of a republic while believing that the universe is a monarchy.

Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.

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

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