"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that's exactly the way we want it to be."
— Bob Dylan

"Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar"
— Jim Butcher (Dead Beat)

"You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizons. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about- the more you have left if anything goes wrong."
— Ethel Barrymore

"The truth knocks on the door and you say, "Go away, I'm looking for the truth," and so it goes away. Puzzling."
— Robert M. Pirsig

"The way out is through the door. Why is it that no one will use this method?"
— Confucius

"Only the hand that erases can write the true thing."
— Meister Eckhart

"Not being tense but ready.
Not thinking but not dreaming.
Not being set but flexible.
Liberation from the uneasy sense of confinement.
It is being wholly and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for whatever may come."
— Bruce Lee (Tao of Jeet Kune Do)

"...it's like this. Sometimes, when you've a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly long it is and feel sure you'll never get it swept. And then you start to hurry. You work faster and faster and every time you look up there seems to be just as much left to sweep as before, and you try even harder, and you panic, and in the end you're out of breath and have to stop--and still the street stretches away in front of you. That's not the way to do it.

You must never think of the whole street at once, understand? You must only concentrate on the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom, and the next, and the next. Nothing else.

That way you enjoy your work, which is important, because then you make a good job of it. And that's how it ought to be.

And all at once, before you know it, you find you've swept the whole street clean, bit by bit. what's more, you aren't out of breath. That's important, too... (28-29)"
— Michael Ende (Momo)

"Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate."
— Chuang-Tzu (Chuang-tzu: the Treatise of the Transcendent Master from Nan-hua: Nan-Hua-Ch'en-Ching : or the Treatise of the Transcendent Master from Nan-Hua English Translation by Derek Bryce)

"It is easy to believe we are each waves and forget we are also the ocean."
— Jon J. Muth

"Like vanishing dew,
a passing apparition
or the sudden flash
of lightning -- already gone --
thus should one regard one's self."
— Ikkyu

"Many have died; you also will die. The drum of death is being beaten. The world has fallen in love with a dream. Only sayings of the wise will remain."
— Kabir (The Bijak of Kabir)

"The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion."
— Alan Wilson Watts

"When you've understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can't understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom."
— Jack Kerouac (The Scripture of the Golden Eternity)

"Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It *is*--is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement.

To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your earing, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise and blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"We live thinking I am right, I am wise. Herein lies the cause of human delusion."
— Ko Kamei

"It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable."
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Stoic Philosophy of Seneca Essays and Letters)

"A boddhisattva is someone who is on the way to becoming a buddha. All of us become boddhisattvas as soon as we start to take our Zen work seriously and the work we do contributes to creating a world in which all good actions become more efficacious."
— David Brazier

"What happens to the drop of wine
That you pour into the sea?
Does it remain itself, unchanged?
It is as if it never existed.
So it is with the soul: Love drinks it in,
It is united with Truth,
Its old nature fades away,
It is no longer master of itself.

The soul wills and yet does not will:
Its will belongs to Another.
It has eyes only for this beauty;
It no longer seeks to possess, as was its wont--
It lacks the strength to possess such sweetness.
The base of this highest of peaks
Is founded on nichil,
Shaped nothingness, made one with the Lord."
— Jacopone Da Todi (The God-Madness)

"To preserve the silence within--amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness where the rain falls and the grain ripens--no matter how many tramp across the parade ground in whirling dust under an arid sky."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"This accidental
meeting of possibilities
calls itself I.

I ask: what am I doing here?
And, at once, this I
becomes unreal."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"A falcon hovers at the edge of the sky.
Two gulls drift slowly up the river.

Vulnerable while they ride the wind,
they coast and glide with ease.

Dew is heavy on the grass below,
the spider's web is ready.

Heaven's ways include the human:
among a thousand sorrows, I stand alone."
— Du Fu

"Where there are people, there are flies...and Buddhas."
— Issa

"A heart never created hatred; speech created hatred."
— Sumerian Proverb

"O bird of the morning, learn love from the moth
Because it burnt, lost its life, and found no voice.
These pretenders are ignorantly in search of Him,
Because he who obtained knowledge has not returned.

O thou who art above all imaginations, conjectures, opinions and
ideas,
Above anything people have said or we have heard or read,
The assembly is finished and life has reached its term
And we have, as at first, remained powerless in describing thee. "
— Sa'di (The Gulistan of Sa'di)

"Humility before the flower at the timber line is the gate which gives access to the path up the open fell."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"It is the power of a mind to be unconquerable."
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Stoic Philosophy of Seneca Essays and Letters)

"Life is in the keeping of a single breath and the world is an existence between two annihilations."
— Sa'di (The Gulistan of Sa'di)

"Who washes his hands of life
Says whatever he has in his heart. "
— Sa'di (The Gulistan of Sa'di)

"Doffing the ego's
safe glory, he finds
his naked reality."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"tahiya hote pavan nahin pani, tahiya srishti kown utpati;
tahiya hote kali nahin phula, tahiya hote garbh nahi mula;
tahiya hote vidya nahin Veda, tahiya hote shabd nahin swada;
tahiya hote pind nahin basu,
nahin dhar dharni na pavan akasu;
tahiya hote guru nahin chela, gamya agamya na panth duhela.

Sakhi: avigati ki gati ka kahown, jake gawn na thawn
gun bihuna pekhana, ka kahi lijai nawn

In that state there is no air or water, and no creation or creator; There is no bud or flower, and no fetus or semen; There is no education or Vedas, and no word or taste; There is no body or settlement, and no earth, air or space; There is no guru or disciple, and no easy or difficult path.

Sakhi: That state is very strange. I cannot explain it. It has no village or resting place. That state is without gunas (qualities). What name can on give it? "
— Kabir (The Bijak of Kabir)

"Like wind-- In it, with it, of it. Of it just like a sail, so light and strong that, even when it is bent flat, it gathers all the power of the wind without hampering its course.

Like light-- In light, lit through by light, transformed into light. Like the lens which disappears in the light it focuses.

Like wind. Like light.

Just this--on these expanses, on these heights."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"Some may slander, some may abuse;
They try to set fire to the heavens with a torch
And end by merely tiring themselves out.
I hear their scandal as though it were ambrosial truth;
Immediately everything melts
And I enter the place beyond thought and words."
— Yoka Genkaku

"Walking is Zen, sitting is Zen;
Speaking or silent, active or quiet, the essence is at peace.
Even facing the sword of death, our mind is unmoved;
Even drinking poison, our mind is quiet."
— Yoka Genkaku

"The eternity of "anytime" shines in this moment "now" while the unlimitedness of "anyplace" is manifested in the limits of "here." When the universality of "anyone" dances out in the individual "I," for the first time you have the world of Zen."
— Omori Sogen (An Introduction to Zen Training: A Translation of Sanzen Nyumon)

"No me: Dharmas all
empty.

Death, Life, small
difference.
Heart of mystery's
transformation:
know, and see.

The Truth cries out
where the arrow strikes the target."
— Hui K'o

"Once Seung Sahn Soen-sa and a student of his attended a talk at a Zen center in California. The Dharma teacher spoke about Bodhidharma. After the talk, someone asked him "What's the difference between Bodhidharma's sitting in Sorim for nine years and your sitting here now?"

The Dharma teacher said, "About five thousand miles."
The questioner said, "Is that all?"
The Dharma teacher said, "Give or take a few miles."

Later on, Soen-sa asked his student, "What do you think of these answers?"
"Not bad, not good. But the dog runs after the bone."
"How would you answer?"
"I'd say, 'Why do you make a difference?' "

Soen-sa said, "Not bad. Now you ask me."
"What's the difference between Bodhidharma's sitting in Sorim for nine years and your sitting here now?"
"Don't you know?"
"I'm listening."
"Bodhidharma sat in Sorim for nine years. I am sitting here now."

The student smiled."
— Seung Sahn (Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teaching of Zen Master Seung Sahn)

"What is the sound of one's pants barking?"
— Seizure Romero

"The dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis--only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence. For this is the truth we must reach to live, that everything is and we just in it."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"Pardon all runners,
All speechless, alien winds,
All mad waters.

Pardon their impulses,
Their wild attitudes,
Their young flights, their reticence.

When a message has no clothes on
How can it be spoken."
— Thomas Merton