Quotes About Zen

Careful patience is the fastest way!

Beneath his zen-like tranquility lurks something wounded… and dangerous.

He didn't want to think about the past, present, or future.

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment.

In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate.

All phenomena are empty.

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Be here now.

The function of the zazen and koan is to undo the system that contains them.

The unspoken conspiracy of all religions—and the Buddhism of Zen Buddhism is not an exception—is their seemingly irresistable inclination to make metaphysical what is not so, and then to organize into complexity what is inherently simple.

Concentration is the ability to think about absolutely nothing when it is absolutely necessary.

I always get very calm with baseball.

In football, it's not enough just to be amazing, but you also have to have a clear head. If you're not calm, it becomes very difficult.

I'm very spiritual. I meditate every day. I don't know if that's surprising or not, but I've been doing that since I was 16 every day, so that's like kind of my thing. I'm really a hippie-chick at heart.

The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an allegory about [the perpetual paradox that when one is closest to a destination one is also the farthest).

the use of prajna in the title tells us this is a text that goes beyond the analysis of reality into discrete, knowable entities, such as those used by the Sarvastivadins. Thus, Zen masters ask their students to show them their original face, their face before they were born.

Poem by Stonehouse I was a Zen monk who didn't know Zen so I chose the woods for the years I had left a robe made of patches over my body a belt of bamboo around my waist mountains and streams explain Bodhidharma's meaning flower smiles and birdsongs reveal the hidden key sometimes I sit on a flat-topped rock after midnight cloudless nights when the moon fills the sky Translated by Red Pine

Bad things are not the worst things that an happen to us. NOTHING is the worst thing that can happen to us.

There are some Buddhist philosophers (a branch referred to as Zen) who say that sometimes a bad thing happens to prevent a worse thing happening

For Zen, man is the goal; man is the end unto himself. God is not something above humanity, God is something hidden within humanity. Man is carrying God in himself as a potentiality.

Zen is very easy! It's like touching your nose when you wash your face in the morning!

In fact, in many ways my mother was quite hippy-dippy, serving macrobiotic food and reading 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.'