Quotes About Meditation

On the other hand, there is another trap that people can and often do fall into, and that is the one of thinking that we must practice zazen in all of our day-to-day activities. The obvious next step in this way of thinking is to equate all of one's activities with zazen. That is, everything one does is zazen?eating, sleeping

drinking, being. The practical problem in this way of thinking is that all too often people simply wind up doing less and less zazen, deluding themselves into believing that since all their activities are zazen there is no need to sit and face the wall and do zazen.

To know yourself is to forget yourself.

Keep your mouth shut and look directly at impermanence!

Zazen doesn't give you something—it's the complete opposite!

Buddha is not divine. Buddha is your daily life.

Four Noble Truths: the truth of the universality of suffering, the truth of the origin of suffering, the truth of the cessation of suffering, and the truth of the path leading to its cessation.

Be present, from moment to moment, right in the middle of the real stream of time. That gives you spiritual security.

prayer:   God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

God grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can; And the wisdom to know the difference

He is a moviegoer, though of course he does not go to movies.

When a painting I'm working on becomes my singular focus—when I am "in the zone," as I've heard people put it—a trancelike state will sometimes overtake me.

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?

I lean and loaf at my ease... observing a spear of summer grass.

Why should I pray? Why should I venerate and be ceremonious?

I swear I see what is better than to tell the best, It is always to leave the best untold. -from A Song of the Rolling Earth

I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me, In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me, In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me.

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me? (I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and always drop fruit as I pass;)

Here by myself away from the clank of the world,   Tallying and talk'd to here by tongues aromatic

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

I lean and loafe at my ease...observing a spear of summer grass.

Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems

Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.

Let me think Thinking is all I have If wisdom is a pretense Then let me pretend to be wise