“To travel well is better than to arrive.” A world which values only “getting somewhere” as fast as possible becomes a world without substance. One can get anywhere and everywhere, and yet the more this is possible, the less is anywhere and everywhere worth getting to.

How different it would be to live in a world where everybody realizes that space is the mind, rather than our present superstition that the mind is something inside your head.

Wherever the past is dropped away and safety abandoned, life is renewed.

So-called diseases of plants are the full life of some other kind of organism having a ball. And you see this complexly interrelated world, and you realize that it all hangs together. That everything outside the human world is a system of balances where you couldn’t have, really,

People can laugh at themselves because they know, deep down, that their lives are a big act, a put–on.

We belong in this world. We didn't arrive here from somewhere else, we're not tourists in the universe—we're expressions of it.

The position of the Zen master is: there is nothing to tell you. We’re not offering you any panacea, any solution, any doctrine, any big, big goodie to the problem of life. Because the problem is an illusion.

One of the great problems of the United States, legally and politically, is that we have never quite had the courage of our convictions. The republic is founded on the marvelously sane principle that a human community can exist and prosper only on a basis of mutual trust.

In my particular work it is frequently my fate to have to take lunch or dinner in the student-union cafeterias of universities all over the country. All are identical. Icebox lettuce with a glob of cottage cheese and a wedge of canned pineapple. Slices of overdone and warmed-over

True open-mindedness is what I’ve tried to explain as mental silence, of being able to be completely surprised by reality, and to observe that it is not at all what you thought it was or what you were brought up to believe. And not to be afraid when you suddenly discover the

We need to become vividly aware of our ecology, of our interdependence and virtual identity with all other forms of life which the divisive and emboxing methods of our current way of thought prevent us from experiencing. The so-called physical world and the so-called human body

As a people, our ideal is to have a future, and so long as this is so we shall never have a present. But only those who have a present, and who can relate to it materially and immediately, have any use for making plans for the future, for when their plans mature they will enjoy

Everybody regards the nation as an entity that exists in its own right distinct from every individual in it, and therefore shifts responsibility to that—as if the nation existed; as if, in other words, the government were something different from you.

Expressed by Lin Yutang as follows: “If a chicken has been killed, and it is not cooked properly, that chicken has died in vain.” The very least I can do for a creature that has died for me is to honor it, not with an empty ritual, but by cooking it to perfection and relishing it

We look for this optimal point where there is a risk—there must be a risk, there must be chance, it mustn’t all be predetermined—because any game where the result is known is not worth playing.

A Chinese philosophical work called The Secret of the Golden Flower says that “when purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing has been grasped.” For a society surviving to no purpose is one that makes no provision for puposeless behavior—that is, for actions

An enlightened Hindu or Buddhist looks at the ignorant people of this world and says, “My respects. Because here I see the divine essence having altogether forgotten what it is and playing the most far out game of being completely lost. Congratulations! How far out can you get?”

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

Reality itself is—gorgeous. It is the plenum, the fullness of total joy. Wow-wee!

A lot of people are afraid that, when they die, they're going to be locked up in a dark room forever, and sort of 'undergo' that. But, one of the most interesting things in the world—this is a yoga, this is a way of realization—Try and imagine what it will be like to go to sleep