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.