Zen Like Quotes

#1. There's something so zen-like and grateful of just ripping a hot wing apart and getting it all over your face, and everyone's happy. I love that atmosphere.

Ronda Rousey

#2. All of us should treasure his (John Dillinger) Oriental wisdom and his preaching of a Zen-like detachment, as exemplified by his constant reminder to clerks, tellers, or others who grew excited by his presence in their banks: 'Just lie down on the floor and keep calm.

Robert Anton Wilson

#3. No one is ever more him/herself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It's very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open.

George Carlin

#4. Baseball is one of the most beautiful games. It is. It is a very Zen-like game.

Jim Jarmusch

#5. There's something Zen-like about the way I work - it's like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.

Chuck Close

#6. I have developed a Zen-like approach to the operating systems that people use: 'When you're ready, the right operating system will appear in your life.'

Guy Kawasaki

#7. Sam Keen points out that Zen masters spend years to reach an enlightenment that every natural child already knows - the total incarnation of sleeping when you're tired and eating when you're hungry. What irony that this state of Zen-like bliss is programmatically and systematically destroyed.

John Bradshaw

#8. Every homeowner deserves a Zen-like area to revitalize, rejuvenate and read.

Geralin Thomas

#9. We sell tea in Starbucks, but I think the experience is very different. I think coffee is something that is quick - it's transactional. I think tea is more Zen-like. It requires a different environment.

Howard Schultz

#10. I used to try to hypnotize myself into a Zen-like state of resignation at the outset. It doesn't work, not for this grasshopper. I have my own process, as they say. I call it the motherfucker process.

Matthew B. Crawford

#11. Crowdsourcing is the ultimate disruptor of distribution because in a most Zen-like fashion, the content is controlled by everyone and no one at the same time.

Jay Samit

#12. People talk about the joy of running--of the endorphins and reaching a Zen-like clarity of mind. This had never happened to me. Mostly, all I thought about when I ran was how much further I had to go before I could stop.

Laura Morrigan

#13. Write because you love the work, not because of what might come from it. The journey is the purpose. Very Zen-like, I know, but honest to God it's the truth. And I have never had to deal with writer's block. Knock on wood.

William Kent Krueger

#14. This is the monkey mind of which Zen speaks: the mind that worries, doubts, frets about the past, makes lists, all the time chattering like a monkey.

Patricia Monaghan

#15. The Zen Master was constantly attempting to break up concepts that people had about what it was like to be a spiritual teacher. We have a traditional image. Each Zen master was a complete character.

Frederick Lenz

#16. When a garden is used as a place to pause for thought, that is when a Zen garden comes to life. When you contemplate a garden like this it will form as lasting impression on your heart.

Muso Soseki

#17. It's like zen. Only not as subtle.

J.J. Connolly

#18. Whether I'm a good wife doesn't have anything to do with what he was like.

Zen Cho

#19. But one may like someone enough to kiss them without liking them enough to confide in them. The two are quite different emotions.

Zen Cho

#20. Apples to oranges, the act of comparing your life to another's is more like comparing an elephant to an apple, it makes no sense to compare someone's life that you have no knowledge about to that of your own, of which in all earnest is not something that you completely understand yourself.

Forrest Curran

#21. You can do anything you like - really - but this [Sci-Fi] is absolutely disciplined, it's Zen, you have to be absolutely focused in an area. You have to zone into an area and you then you can achieve when you get there. It's really weird!

Danny Boyle

#22. There are things that I value now that I didn't when I first went over there, like Zen Buddhism, which has become part of my life over the last couple years.

Matthew Sweet

#23. The path of Tao is not that of sudden enlightenment. It is not like Zen. Zen is sudden enlightenment, Tao is gradual growth.

Osho

#24. The drive to Santa Fe on I-25 is midly zen. There are public road signs that say "Gusty Winds May Exist". This seems more like lazy philosophy than travel advice.

Chuck Klosterman

#25. One has to reach to the absolute state of awareness: that is Zen. You cannot do it every morning for a few minutes or for half an hour and then forget all about it. It has to become like your heartbeat. You have to sit in it, you have to walk in it. Yes, you have even to sleep in it.

Rajneesh

#26. Whether you are a genius or an idiot, a thief or, like me, a Zen priest who has cultivated the mind for 30 years - the mind anyway is subject to conditions.

Zoketsu Norman Fischer

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

Zen

#28. I love jeans and T-shirts, but for red carpets, I like Oscar de la Renta, who is timeless. Marchesa celebrates the female form in an ethereal way. Donna Karan does an Urban Zen collection, which is eco-friendly. I love socially conscious fashion.

Serinda Swan

#29. My blogging life is basically goalless. I like the zen nature of that, and paradoxically, it improves results.

Seth Godin

#30. Christopher, like most people, didn't like his universe being unfathomable, so I doubted that a Zen koan would help him.

Scarlett Thomas

#31. A person who undertakes the study of Zen and learns concentration and meditation is like a gymnast. You become a gymnast of the mind.

Frederick Lenz

#32. If you're very, very conservative and you like that sort of practice, go find a very conservative Zen master and just do traditional Japanese practice, which is not that traditional actually.

Frederick Lenz

#33. Like vanishing dew,
a passing apparition
or the sudden flash
of lightning
already gone
thus should one regard one's self.

Ikkyu

#34. Tantric Zen leads to illumination and fun right here and now, which is why I like it.

Frederick Lenz

#35. The future of humanity will move closer and closer toward the approach of Zen, because the meeting of the East and West is possible only through something like Zen, which is earthly and yet unearthly.

Rajneesh

#36. If only people stopped acting like they've been asked to donate a lung every time somebody asks for something the world would be a better place

Alina Radoi

#37. Just like there are different roads that lead to different places, so there are different levels of awareness that lead to different places and we shift in and out of them. These are the ten thousand states of mind that we study in Zen.

Frederick Lenz

#38. In the study of Zen you can learn how to strengthen and clarify your finite mind. Your finite mind is like a muscle; when exercised it becomes stronger.

Frederick Lenz

#39. Golf is a spiritual game. It's like Zen. You have to let your mind take over.

Amy Alcott

#40. 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

#41. If you try to grasp Zen in movement, it goes into stillness. If you try to grasp Zen in stillness, it goes into movement. It is like a fish hidden in a spring, drumming up waves and dancing independently.

Linji Yixuan

#42. HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I am so ZEN. This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it's so cool to be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.

Chuck Palahniuk

#43. Yes, you are creative and in slow, languid times, creativity peers out of your soul like a field mouse from its burrow at night.

Michele Jennae

#44. Zen Master Doc The says that when sitting in meditation, one should sit upright, giving birth to this thought, Sitting here is like sitting on the Bodhi spot.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#45. We call it the transmission of the lamp in Zen. That's when we take enlightened states of mind and literally, you can transfer them, just like you can hand somebody flowers.

Frederick Lenz

#46. Like pebbles in a bag, the monks polish each other.

Unknown

#47. Zen is very easy! It's like touching your nose when you wash your face in the morning!

Seungsahn

#48. I am not a big technology person. I don't go on the Internet really much at all. Drawing is like a zen thing; it's private, which in this day and age is harder to come by.

Tim Burton

#49. Zen is like soap. First you wash with it, and then you wash off the soap.

Yamaoka Tesshu

#50. After spending all that time in bed, I realized I was treating the act of eating as though it's the art of Zen, taking in just enough, a little at a time, slowly. Exactly the way I never did with food. Like dancing without passion, eating like that will never awaken your palate.

Kyung-ran Jo

#51. 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

#52. Sometimes people come up and they get infatuated with some little brief imagistic poem or something, and they say, "Oh, I really like your Zen poems." And I say, "Which ones are not Zen poems?"

Sam Hamill

#53. It's a relationship like to a crusty Zen master, or something like that. And it is really like another entity because you cannot predict the answers.

Terence McKenna

#54. Tangerine clam, and a professional desktop computer that suggested a Zen ice cube. Like bell-bottoms that turn up in the

Walter Isaacson

#55. I like the Zen artists: they'd do some work, and then they'd stop for a while.

Saul Leiter

#56. It's kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.

Peter Watts

#57. Watermelons and Zen students grow pretty much the same way. Long periods of sitting till they ripen and grow all juicy inside, but when you knock them on the head to see if they're ready sounds like nothing's going on.

Peter Levitt

#58. I guess Zen is a day like this when you are part of the air and remember things

Stephen Chbosky

#59. Peace does not demand that everyone like or want the same reality.

Alaric Hutchinson

#60. 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

#61. Love was like swallowing a cili padi whole.

Zen Cho

#62. I suppose what I like about Zen is that the teachers are constantly questioning your insight and challenging it, looking for sloppiness or laziness in it, and ways you can go past that.

David O. Russell

#63. 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

#64. We should live every day like people who have just been rescued from the moon.

Thich Nhat Hanh

#65. If you ask Zen people they will say; tea is not something that you pour with unawareness and drink like any other drink. It is not a drink, it is meditation; it is prayer. So they listen to the kettle creating a melody, and in that listening they become more silent, more alert.

Rajneesh

#66. Your body is like a dew-drop on the morning grass, your life is as brief as a flash of lightning. Momentary and vain, it is lost in a moment. (From 'Fukan zazengi')

Dogen

#67. I don't give a damn about power and money per se. Really, I don't. I may be a selfish bastard, but I'm incredibly cool about shit like that. I could be a Zen saint. The one thing I do have, though, is curiosity. I want to see what I can do out there in the big, tough world.

Haruki Murakami

#68. I work out because that's my job, but what I enjoy about it, beyond the vanity, is the Zen of it. I like getting out of my head, and one great way to do that is to sweat your face off. And to know that, if you're thinking of anything else, you're not working intensely enough.

Chris Pine

#69. One thing I like about Zen. It doesn't believe in achievement.

Agnes Martin

#70. We enter a discipline like Zen practice so that we can learn to live in a sane way.

Charlotte Joko Beck

#71. 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

#72. 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.

#73. To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#74. To have some deep feeling about Buddhism is not the point; we just do what we should do, like eating supper and going to bed. This is Buddhism.

Shunryu Suzuki

#75. A thief running away like mad from a ferocious watch-dog may be a splendid example of Zen.

Reginald Horace Blyth

#76. I like Catch-22, Gravity's Rainbow and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for instance, because the authors of those three surrealistic novels - Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Pirsig - invented their own rules, knowing that the old ones wouldn't do the job they had in mind.

William Zinsser

#77. That stone Buddha deserves all the
birdshit it gets
I wave my skinny arms like a tall
flower in the wind

Ikkyu

#78. He makes it sound so Zen. Or Jedi. Like some kind of Wolf Yoda. There is no try. And maybe that's all there is to it. Don't over-think the shift. Just embrace the form that I want to be in.

Kat Kruger

#79. What writing practice, like Zen practice does is bring you back to the natural state of mind ... The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were brought up to think-well-mannered, congenial.

Natalie Goldberg

#80. The Buddha is found in other people - even the ones we do not like very much.

Francis Harold Cook

#81. When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.

Matsuo Basho

#82. And the Yak, they can afford to move so fucking slow, man, they'll wait years and years. Give you a whole life, just so you'll have more to lose when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders.

William Gibson