Quotes About Zen

Be nothing. Be not the spider nor the man nor the future nor the past. Be the moment. Be nothing.

I always say centered food equals centered behavior.

Learn to ignore everything

Zen martini: A martini with no vermouth at all. And no gin, either.

The renowned seventh-century Zen master Seng-tsan taught that true freedom is being "without anxiety about imperfection.

In a rock garden we foster a little patch of the wilderness that stands to us for freedom.

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

Zen is not effort. Effort is tension, effort is work, effort is to achieve something. Zen is not something to achieve. You are already that. Just relax, relax so deeply that you become a revelation to yourself.

The hardest thing to do is something that is close to nothing.

Vivir sin tropezar por causa de Jesús no es ninguna experiencia al estilo Zen. Es llevar una vida sometida a su soberanía, su misterio y su amor. Jesús nos promete que seremos bienaventurados si no hallamos tropiezo en él cuando hace cosas a favor de otras personas.

A self-imposed workout is Western meditation at its finest—not tranquil Zen breaths, but all-American panting and puffing, followed by a peace that may be as fine in its way as anything the monks can produce with two hours

A recently deceased American Zen master and navy veteran, John Daido Loori, used to say that those who think Buddhism is just about stillness end up sitting very silently up to their necks in their own shit.

everything else out of his mind the way

The Buddha resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain. — Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

This was the plan: we would take a holy and sacred picture of the King of Rock 'n' Roll, Elvis Presley, to the very summit of the earth; once there, we would place it with sincere reverence amongst the chimerical shimmering palaces of ice and snow and then (accompanied by some weird Zen magic) we would light joss sticks, dance about making screechy kung-fu noises, get off our faces, and that would be it: Planet Earth saved. Simple.

It's the kind of gratitude you have, she said, "when you've had a teacher who's brilliant, who has shown you the way in a fundamental sense, not in a relative sense. Who has really been able to help you see for yourself the fundamental reality beyond the duality of good and evil." Alas, she added, Zen Buddhists can "forget that we have to live in the relative world of good and evil, that we have to make choices based on right and wrong.

antidote to choking or the yips is always the same: focus on this moment, this point, this delivery and nothing else.

Zen cuts straight through the Quidditch match in progress and almost gets taken down by a Beater hurling a Nerf quaffle right at his machopartes.

What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future.

At Patagonia, making a profit is not the goal because the Zen master would say profits happen 'when you do everything else right'.

The essence of the Way is detachment. And the goal of those who practice is freedom from appearances.

People ask what my goal is. I don't have a goal.

Ultimately, the goal of hitting is to get your mind out of the way and let your body take over - and to slow the game down

There is no greater work of minimalist art than the dry garden in the Zen Buddhist temple of Ry?an-ji, Kyoto. This comprises fifteen rocks of various sizes set in a sea of white, raked gravel; almost nothing, but you could look at it for hours. It was made about 500 years before the modernist architect Mies van der Rohe remarked that less is more.