He preacheth patience that never knew pain
The mistake consists in our splitting into two what is really and absolutely one. Is not life one as we live it, which we cut to pieces by recklessly applying the murderous knife of intellectual surgery?
When we start to feel anxious or depressed, instead of asking, "What do I need to get to be happy?" The question becomes, "What am I doing to disturb the inner peace that I already have?"
Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.
The more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with the deepening of your character you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life. All great artists, all great religious leaders, and all great social reformers have come out of the intensest struggles which they fought bravely, quite frequently in tears and with bleeding hearts
Thought creates things by slicing up reality into small bits that it can easily grasp. Thus when you are think-ing you are thing-ing. Thought does not report things, it distorts reality to create things, and as Bergson noted, "In so doing it allows what is the very essence of the real to escape. " Thus to the extent we actually imagine a world of discrete and separate things, conceptions have become perceptions, and we have in this manner populated our universe with nothing but ghosts.
The truth of Zen, just a little bit of it, is what turns one's humdrum life, a life of monotonous, uninspiring commonplaceness, into one of art, full of genuine inner creativity.
May you have the income of a Republican and the sex life of a Democrat!
Volunteering is so pervasive it's invisible. We take for granted all the things that have been pioneered by concerned, active volunteers.
The reason men oppose progress is not that they hate progress, but that they love inertia.
Well that would be nice but I am not complaining about things being hectic, it is great what I have been able to do, it's just that things get a bit much sometimes.