Once you've learned to think you can't stop. And an enormous number of people devote their lives to keeping their minds busy and feel extremely uncomfortable with silence.

...for thousands of years human history has been a magnificently futile conflict, a wonderfully staged panorama of triumphs and tragedies based on the resolute taboo against admitting that black goes with white.

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.

Life and love generate effort but effort will not generate them.

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

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.