We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the thing necessary for us-whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need

Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains.

The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them.

We love the things we pretend to laugh at.

Saints are what they are not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everyone else.

Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness.

The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out.