Good Zen Quotes

#1. To be a good Zen Buddhist it is not enough to follow the teaching of its founder; we have to experience the Buddha's experience.

D.T. Suzuki

#2. The person who's in the Zen monastery, who's doing a kind of poor job at meditating and a half-ass job cleaning the gardens is not doing very good yoga.

Frederick Lenz

#3. A person in such a hurry seldom gets good results

Jon J. Muth

#4. There is no reason good enough for us to ever be out of alignment with Peace, and there is no reason good enough for us to ever be out of alignment with Love.

Alaric Hutchinson

#5. The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist the good without the bad, the gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes.

Alan Watts

#6. Think of Zen, of the Void, of Good and Evil and you are bound hand and foot. Think only and entirely and completely of what you are doing at the moment and you are free as a bird.

Reginald Horace Blyth

#7. It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness ... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.

Robert M. Pirsig

#8. Hard to restrain, unstable is this mind; it flits wherever it lists. Good it is to control the mind. A controlled mind brings happiness.

Gautama Buddha

#9. In Zen Buddhism, the greater your doubt, the greater will be your enlightenment. That is why doubt can be a good thing. If you are too sure, if you always have conviction, then you may be caught in your wrong perception for a long time.

Nhat Hanh

#10. So what I liked about Zen was that it never goes off into the realm of imagination land, or if it does occasionally, the good teachers will openly address it specifically as only imagination. Both of my teachers were very good at that.

Brad Warner

#11. In Zen Buddhism an action is considered good when it brings happiness and well-being to oneself and others, evil when it brings suffering and harm to oneself and others.

Thich Thien-An

#12. To enter the Buddha Way is to stop discriminating between good and evil and to cast aside the mind that says this is good and that is bad.

Dogen

#13. 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

#14. I am not important. If I take a break, no one dies. And this is A Good Thing.

Helen Russell

#15. Everything real is in the present moment. Only here can we find happiness and harmony, feel alive and do something that will change our future. Only here can we be with the people we love, enjoy the things we like and see beautiful places.

Lidiya K.

#16. Positive simply means unifying energies, while negative simply means separating energies. It's not about what's good or bad, right or wrong. It's about
embracing what feels good and brings us closer to peace.

Alaric Hutchinson

#17. Old Zen is the way of nothingness, the way of having a good time.

Frederick Lenz

#18. If your idea of good opposes something else, you can be sure that [it] is not absolute or certain.

Steve Hagen

#19. Good and bad aren't absolutes. They are beliefs, judgements, ideas based on limited knowledge as well as on the inclinations of our minds.

Steve Hagen

#20. Any good athletic is always in a state of perpetual training, as is the Zen student.

Frederick Lenz

#21. It's important to have a vision of the long run and make wise decisions for our highest good in the present moment; however, we don't want to become attached to how everything must look. When we show up in good faith, life provides. And when we trust, we are always in the flow of manifestation.

Alaric Hutchinson

#22. A good memory, I'm sure," Zen returned. "But a memory nonetheless.

Kate Angell

#23. Work in a place that feels good to you. Select the best of that which is available. The Zen of working is just to do it, not to worry about it. Feel you would be doing it without the money.

Frederick Lenz

#24. Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.

Alan Watts

#25. A Buddha doesn't observe precepts. A Buddha doesn't do good or evil. A Buddha isn't energetic or lazy. A Buddha is someone who does nothing, someone who can't even focus his mind on a Buddha. A Buddha isn't a Buddha. Don't think about Buddhas.

Bodhidharma

#26. But until then, and right now, the sun is bright, the air is cool, my head is clear, there's a whole day ahead of us, we're almost to the mountains, it's a good day to be alive. It's this thinner air that does it. You always feel like this when you start getting into higher altitudes.

Robert M. Pirsig

#27. Good times come and go. And bad times do the same.

Steve Hagen