Water Zen Quotes

#1. Like the moon on the water, in a way. When you confront a Zen master, what you're really seeing are not his limitations but yours.

Pico Iyer

#2. Can the water in the valleys ever stop and rest?
When the water finally reaches the sea, it becomes great waves.

Francis Harold Cook

#3. Being under stress is like being stranded in a body of water. If you panic, it will cause you to flail around so that the water rushes into your lungs and creates further distress. Yet, by calmly collecting yourself and using controlled breathing you remain afloat with ease.

Alaric Hutchinson

#4. Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water.

Michael Cunningham

#5. This is what Zen means by being detached - not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water.

Alan Watts

#6. May we exist like a lotus, / At home in the muddy water. / Thus we bow to life as it is.

Zen

#7. Zen masters say you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#8. Life, according to Zen, ought to be lived as a bird flies through the air, or as a fish swims in the water.

D.T. Suzuki

#9. To an experienced Zen Buddhist, asking if one believes in Zen or one believes in the Buddha, sounds a little ludicrous, like asking if one believes in air or water. Similarly Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience.

Robert M. Pirsig

#10. The practice of Zen is to eat, breathe, cook, carry water, and scrub the toilet - to infuse every act of body, speech, and mind - with mindfulness, to illuminate every leaf and pebble, every heap of garbage, every path that leads to our mind's return home.

Nhat Hanh

#11. The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me.

David Foster Wallace