Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.
Hymns are the poetry of the people.
Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before the dark hour of reason grows.
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
Norfolk would not be Norfolk without a church tower on the horizon or round a corner up a lane. We cannot spare a single Norfolk church. When a church has been pulled down the country seems empty or is like a necklace with a jewel missing.
On out deathbeds we're not going to regret all the work we didn't do. We're going to regret all the sex we didn't have!
Too many people in the modern world view poetry as a luxury, not a necessity like petrol. But to me it's the oil of life.
The mind we have when we practice zazen is the great mind: we don't try to see anything; we stop conceptual thinking; we stop emotional activity; we just sit. Whatever happens to us, we are not bothered. We just sit. It is like something happening in the great sky. Whatever kind of bird flies through it, the sky doesn't care. That is the mind transmitted from Buddha to us.
So much of what we said sounded crazy, yet none of it was false. . . as if two theoretical physicists stood on stage to say that when we travel near lightspeed, we get younger than nontravellers; that a mile of space next to the sun is differnt than a mile of space next to the earth because the sun-mile space is curved more than the the earth-mile. Silly ideas, worth the admission price in smiles, but they're true. Is high-energy physics interesting because it's true or because it's crazy?
We collaborate together. We work with other people. We work by ourselves.
It changes your life, the pursuit of truth, if you know that you have tried to find the truth and gone past the first apparent truth towards the real truth. It's very, it's very exciting.