Quotes About Reality

Effort is far more important than so-called success because effort is a real thing. What we call "success" is just the manifestation of our mind's ability to categorize things. This is "success.

Suffering occurs when your ideas about how things ought to be don't match how they really are. Stop for a second and look at this in your life right now. It's important.

You can't live in paradise - but you are living right here. Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really.

When you're alive there's nothing but life. When you die there's nothing but death. So when life comes, be alive. When death comes, die. You don't need to dodge either one, and you don't need to long for either one.

The entire universe has no gaps to accommodate space." Space is not emptiness between one solid thing and another solid thing. Those solid things are

The entire universe has no gaps to accommodate space." Space is not emptiness between one solid thing and another solid thing. Those solid things are also space, or emptiness.

Water, foam, and flame are mind. Flowers in the spring and the moon in the autumn are also mind. Each moment is mind. And yet mind can never be destroyed. That's why everything that's real is mind, and the Buddhas along with other Buddhas are mind.

The downfall is that we humans think about a lot of stuff that's not actually real. We crave certainty in areas where there can never be any. That's when we start in with believing the crazy stuff.

You see that what you call "self" is the manifestation of everything. You reflect and refract the universe around you in a unique way, and that unique way is commonly called "self." But it does not belong to anyone — certainly not to you!

You're going to lose your life anyway. It may be now. It may be decades from now. But at some point it's going to happen, and you have no idea when or how. So it's important to be true to yourself at every moment.

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.

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

We are exactly the truth of what we are — what the universe is — right here and now. Yet we need to do some work to truly become what we already are.

In zazen we practice the oneness of reality.

At every moment of every day, no matter how I feel about the situation, whether it is mind-blowingly thrilling or completely brain-numbing, I am the totality of the universe experiencing the fullness of itself. Even if I don't notice it.

Consciousness is just part of what we are, and not even the most significant part. Form (or matter) is equally important, as are the other skandhas .

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

Well she never thought life would be so full of meanness and disappointment. She hadn't been prepared for it.

There they go, off to Mars, just for the ride, thinking that they will find a planet like a seer's crystal, in which to read a miraculous future. What they'll find, instead, is the somewhat shopworn image of themselves. Mars is a mirror, not a crystal.

As a painter paints pictures on a wall, the intellect goes on creating the world in the heart always.

I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.

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

Climbing that ladder of social hierarchy is an illusion that deludes any sense of happiness or truth.