Quotes About Acceptance

Chasing after fantasies is always a bad idea. Stick with reality. Reality's all you've got. But here's the real secret, the real miracle: it's enough.

In D?gen's view everything is sacred, and to single out one specific thing, like a book or a city or a person, as being more sacred than anything else is a huge mistake.

You'll always find something wrong with wherever you are because it will never quite match your idea of what it "should" be.

Part of the Zen way is learning to enjoy the fact that you cannot possibly have all the things you desire. In the truest sense none of your desires, no matter what they are, can ever be fulfilled because nothing will ever be the way you imagine it to be.

The trick here is to give up imagining how things are gonna be. Or, at the very least, to give up believing that the way you imagine things are going to be has anything to do with the way they really will be.

Even if the whole world is nothing but a bunch of jerks doing all kinds of jerk-type things, there is still liberation in simply not being a jerk.

A quiet room is best for zazen. We shouldn't eat or drink too much, or too little. Put aside everything else. Don't think of good or bad. Don't judge your practice. Stop ruminating and deliberating about stuff. Don't try to become a Buddha.

People always get worried about whether they're doing zazen right. But basically if you're doing it at all, you're probably doing it right — even if your thoughts won't stop, even if you're sleepy or irritable, even if it just feels boring.

Life is not fair in that way or any other way. We are who and what we are.

It'll take a hell of a long time, but one day they will have their piece of the world, and my grandchildren will be going to school with their grandchildren or great-grandchildren. And whites will be marrying colored. And everyone becoming some kind of light shade if brown. That's what it'll be one day.

Whereas all her life her mother had more often than not been in conflict not only with others but with herself, her own circumstances, angry about one thing or another, mostly dissatisfied and even resentful of her lot in life, now she seemed to have let that go. But in its stead, there appeared to be nothing. As if she had finally fully burned her ability to care about anything in the long-stoked fire of her discontent. And now she was empty.

Nuestra preocupación y nuestro amor deben ser constantes e incondicionales, otorgados de entrada y sin condiciones ante lo bueno y lo malo, lo correcto o lo incorrecto, el éxito más brillante o el fracaso más estrepitoso.

She knew her husband to be an understanding man. Allowing people their eccentricities, faults, and mess-ups was one of his virtues, something best learned early by anyone who would presume to work with animals.

They (penguins) then fall madly in love and live happily ever after. - And so you ask yourself: "If a penguin can have a worthwhile, stimulating relationship, why the hell can't I?" - Or maybe you ask yourself: "Would I be happier if I started dating a penguin

Why do we go on and on about individuality being the very essence of who we are, and then accept a degrading level of conformity in virtually every facet of our lives?

He that would be content with a mean condition must not cast his eye upon one that is in a far better estate than himself, but let him look upon him that is lower than he is, and, if he see that such a one bears poverty comfortably, it will help to quiet him.

Though sympathy alone can't alter facts, it can help to make them more bearable.

Ethnic prejudice has no place in sports, and baseball must recognize that truth if it is to maintain stature as a national game.

To think that one's actions could please the masses is indeed a notion bound in irony; someone will inevitably find something wrong in almost everything. So do what it is that you do best and remember to have enough tolerance for two.

I suggest we learn to love ourselves before it's made illegal.

Someone will inevitably find something wrong in almost everything, so do what it is that you do best and remember to have enough tolerance for two.

We are all dead, just not yet buried."

You can't get mad when it rains, whereas you created the storm.

I don't hide from unpleasant possibilities," the Somber Knight replied. "I embrace them. Some call it pessimism. I see it as an advantage.