But spontaneity is not by any means a blind, disorderly urge, a mere power of caprice. A philosophy restricted to the alternatives of conventional language has no way of conceiving an intelligence which does not...

If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you’ll spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that...

The realm of liberation is absolutely incommensurable with the relativities of higher and lower, better and worse, gain and loss, since these are all disadvantages of the ego.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can’t be said.

To look at life without words is not to lose the ability to form words- to think, remember, and plan. To be silent is not to lose your tongue. On the contrary, it is only...

The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.

Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body,...

Camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question, which is whether or not to commit suicide. I think there are four or five serious philosophical questions:The first one is: Who started it?The second...

Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together.

We seldomrealize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions arenot actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and imageswhich we did not invent, but which were given to us by...

Hurrying and delaying are alike ways of trying to resist the present.

A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or...

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

Confucians, along with Hebrew, Islamic, and Catholic scholastics, as well as Protestant fundamentalists, are like tourists who study guidebooks and maps instead of wandering freely and looking at the view. Speech and writing are undoubtedly...

And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words… As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you...

Philosophers, for example, often fail to recognize that their remarks about the universe apply also to themselves and their remarks. If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content.

Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

The art of living… is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new...

The source of all light is in the eye.

Here’s an example: someone says, “Master, please hand me the knife,” and he hands them the knife, blade first. “Please give me the other end,” he says. And the master replies, “What would you do...

I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of “goo.

One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.

Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick.

Faith is a state of openness or trust.To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don’t grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will...

So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated

The answer to the problem of suffering is not away from the problem but in it. The inevitability of pain will not be met by deadening sensitivity but by increasing it, by exploring and feeling...

The knowledge of the past stays with us. To let go is simply to release any images and emotions.

When it comes down to it, government is simply an abandonment of responsibility on the assumption that there are people, other than ourselves, who really know how to manage things. But the government, run ostensibly...

Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense...

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

I owe my solitude to other people.

For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given...

If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself – so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed

We fail so easily to see the difference between fear of the unknown and respect for the unknown, thinking that those who do not hasten in with bright lights and knives are deterred by a...

If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger...

You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.

No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

Here is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you feel driven to survive; survival -going on living- thus becomes a duty and also a drag because you are not fully...

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly...

Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not...

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.