Top 100 Zen Of Quotes
#1. 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
#2. In the West, we think of sports and athletics as individual achievement, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat; it all revolves around the ego. This has nothing to do with the Zen of sports and athletics.
Frederick Lenz
#3. I may discuss contemporary cinema, how to shop at a mall without losing energy, how to use the power of mind to increase career and academic success, the Zen of sports, reincarnation, karma, sex, the experience of "suchness" or a new book by Stephen King.
Frederick Lenz
#4. Yoga has had a profound effect on my songs and performances. I don't meditate in the traditional style of sitting and doing nothing. I prefer the zen of paying attention, such as the meditation of yoga flow, or walking meditations. I also consider singing, surfing and gardening to very meditative.
Jason Mraz
#5. In the Zen of sports and athletics, we seek to bring discipline and control into our physical movements, but at the same time to eliminate the self that gets in the way of perfect play.
Frederick Lenz
#6. The Zen of doing anything is doing it with a particular concentration of mind, a calmness and simplicity of mind, that brings the experience of enlightenment and, through that experience, happiness.
Chris Prentiss
#7. 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
#8. The real Zen of the old Chinese masters was wu-shih, or "no fuss."
Alan Watts
#9. He tapped into the Zen of ignorance, the enlightenment of absurdity.
Christopher Moore
#10. Now when I speak about Zen, I have a problem, in the sense that the Zen of today has lost the essence, in my estimation, of what I call "old Zen."
Frederick Lenz
#11. 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
#12. Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed, do not squander your life.
Dogen
#13. Zen values the simple, concrete, living facts of everyday direct personal experience.
James H. Austin
#14. You will bring yourself the suffering you need to bring yourself so that you may awaken.
T. Scott McLeod
#15. Zen is the game of insight, the game of discovering who you are beneath the social masks.
Reginald Horace Blyth
#16. Every man now is responsible to create a buddhafield around himself, an energy field that goes on becoming bigger and bigger. Create as many vibrations of laughter, joy, celebration, as possible; dance, sing, let the whole of humanity by and by catch the fire of Zen and the wind of Zen.
Rajneesh
#17. Mastery of impulse is achieved through taking pauses during life's contrasting situations. Mastery of impulse is about developing strong willpower that can be used to redirect the flow of energy in any situation. Mastery of impulse is about responding to the world with a sense of reason and peace.
Alaric Hutchinson
#18. He knows not where he's going,
For the ocean will decide,
Its not the destination,
It's the glory of the ride
Edward Monkton
#20. Most writers agree on the fact that Zen is not to be understood but to be lived; and far from being incompatible with the requirements of everyday life, Zen confers on it its own full revealing value.
Robert Linssen
#21. Zen is discipline - the discipline of living life, the discipline of taking a breath, the discipline of not knowing and not trying to know.
Frederick Lenz
#22. Zen is meditation, the actual experience of life directly, immediately with no buffers.
Frederick Lenz
#23. 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 Hammarskjold
#24. Zen professes
itself to be the spirit of Buddhism, but in fact it is the spirit of all
religions and philosophies,
D.T. Suzuki
#25. Zen is a path of liberation. It liberates you. It is freedom from the first step to the last. You are not required to follow any rules; you are required to find out your own rules and your own life in the light of awareness.
Osho
#26. You listen to people, you listen so deeply that you can hear their past lives,
The crackle of their funeral pyres,
Dick Allen
#27. Old age and death are in the natural course of things. There is nothing a doctor can do about them.
Muso Soseki
#28. Your immediate experience is Tantric Zen. How aware are you of your immediate experience? - Probably not that aware.
Frederick Lenz
#29. Zen is to have the heart and soul of a little child.
Takuan Soho
#30. Zen people love Buddha so tremendously that they can even play jokes upon him. It is out of great love; they are not afraid.
Rajneesh
#31. The prospect of future lives in remote heavens as a compensation for the inadequacy of our present lives is a bad tradeoff for losing out on the present.
Francis Harold Cook
#33. Find a Local Zen Temple To Visit Research the authenticity of the Zen teacher. Find out what school they are from, what country they came from, and the ideals they hold most important. If you're interested in a monastery,
Alexis G. Roldan
#34. A point of perspection dances in the balance of the seer's vision.
Zen Benefiel
#35. The secret of zen is just two words: not ... always ... so.
Shunryu Suzuki
#36. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?
Henry David Thoreau
#37. Whether you are cooking, cleaning house, or planting flowers, try to concentrate on the textures, the smells, colors, tastes, sounds, all Zen moments of focused joy.
Jerry Lynch
#38. Shall you live authentically who you are or will you spend your allotted living the life of someone you imagine your self to be?
Earl R. Smith II
#39. The secret of Soto Zen is just two words: not always so ... In Japanese, it's two words, three words in English. That is the secret of our practice.
Shunryu Suzuki
#40. The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.
Thomas Merton
#41. Zen is not, in my view, philosophy or mysticism. It is simply a practice of readjustment of nervous activity. That is, it restores the distorted nervous system to its normal functioning.
Katsuki Sekida
#42. His priorities for a rich and contented life were friendship, freedom, the pleasures of an examined life, and enough food and shelter to keep body and soul together.
Roger Housden
#43. There is a beautiful flow to the study of Zen. If it is not making you happier, then you are not practicing correctly.
Frederick Lenz
#44. Every hour of your life that ticks by, there are numerous points and moments when you can choose to pause - and be aware of your mental and physical state. At any given point, you can freeze the flow that is your life, and be fully conscious for a moment.
Kevin Michel
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. But the goal of Zen Housekeeping is not to have a home that is perfect. It is to embrace the process of keeping the house - one perfect moment at a time.
Lauren Cassel Brownell
#48. When you catch yourself slipping into a pool of negativity, notice how it derives from nothing other than resistance to the current situation.
Donna Quesada
#49. In the words of a Zen poem, At dusk the cock announces dawn; At midnight, the bright sun.
Fritjof Capra
#51. Zen teaches that once we can open up to the inevitability of our demise, we can begin to transform that situation and lighten up about it.
Allen Klein
#52. I've done a fair amount of that stuff ... when we did Lord of the Rings the transformation sequence from Smeagol to Gollum was a 19-hour make-up job. You have to have a kind of zen button that you press and allow the mind to be focused in a certain way.
Andy Serkis
#53. In the mind of the beginner, all things are possible, But in the mind of the expert, only a few. Zen Master Suzuki-Roshi
Barbara L. Jordan
#54. Old Zen was the reduction of concepts to absurdity.
Frederick Lenz
#55. I'm a lapsed Zen Buddhist. I've read hundreds of books on Zen, I meditated daily for about fifteen years, and once spent a month studying with Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
Will McIntosh
#56. [H]uman experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of its senses as by the external objects whose presence the mind reveals.
Alan W. Watts
#57. When you visit the Zen Monasteries, one of the first things required is that you bring a donation. They have to pay for those monasteries. The upkeep is fantastic. The monks have to be fed, and so on.
Frederick Lenz
#58. Zen is the path that focuses the most upon meditation. It is almost exclusively a path of meditation.
Frederick Lenz
#59. In a certain sense, Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.
Alan Watts
#60. I guess Zen is a day like this when you are part of the air and remember things
Stephen Chbosky
#61. What I would say to filmmakers, if I may be so bold or so arrogant, is to draw inspiration from other filmmakers, but go to the place in your own gut where everything is nothing. That's a very Zen thing to say, but that place of nothing is where real creativity comes out of.
Lawrence Bender
#62. The cats were relaxing in a patch of sunlight on the rug without a thought in their sleek brown heads. What matter to them that it was Sunday-or even Thursday? Every day was Today in their scheme of things, and there was no such thing as Yesterday or Tomorrow.
Lilian Jackson Braun
#63. The buddha-dharma ... is about directly seeing Truth, prior to forming any ideas about it. It is about responding to each particular situation as it comes ... , not according to some ... program of dos and don'ts.
Steve Hagen
#64. Every time you run
you create the quality of your own experience
Fred Rohe
#65. The quality of our lives is determined by the focus of our attention.
Cheri Huber
#66. So, without telling any of my Zen-snob buddies, I liked to pretend everything was the Pure Land, that my life was already perfect as it was.
Jaimal Yogis
#67. A Zen student asked his roshi the most important element of Zen.The roshi replied, "Attention." "Yes, thank you," the student replied. "But can you tell me the second most important element?"And the roshi replied, "Attention."
Dan Millman
#68. What I term Zen, old Zen, the original face of Zen, new Zen, pure Zen, or Tantric Zen is - Zen in its essence.
Frederick Lenz
#69. The productivity of people requires continuous learning, as the Japanese have taught us. It requires adoption in the West of the specific Japanese Zen concept where one learns to do better what one already does well.
Peter Drucker
#70. The aunts' conception of the right to privacy went far enough to allow you to close the toilet door when you were peeing, but no further.
Zen Cho
#71. There are different pathways - be it Zen, tantra, karma yoga, or jnana yoga. Different ways have been devised to do the same thing for different types of people according to their temperament.
Frederick Lenz
#72. There is no need to have a deep understanding of Zen.
Shunryu Suzuki
#73. ZEN is MEDITATION. ARCHY is Social Order. ZENARCHY is the Social Order which springs from Meditation. As a doctrine, it holds Universal Enlightenment a prerequisite to abolition of the State, after which a State will inevitably vanish. Or - that failing - nobody will give a damn.
Kerry Thornley
#74. Logic presumes a separation of subject from object; therefore logic is not final wisdom.This is Zen. This is my motorcycle maintenance.
Robert M. Pirsig
#75. I was talking to a Zen master the other day and he said, "You shall be my disciple."I looked at him and said, "Who was Buddha's teacher?" He looked at me in a very odd way for a moment and then he burst into laughter and handed me a piece of clover.
Alan Watts
#76. He was a typical specimen of the younger son in avid pursuit of mediocrity with which the Theurgist's teemed:
Zen Cho
#77. What we can change is our perceptions, which have the effect of changing everything.
Donna Quesada
#78. The more I can accept the fact that change is moving all the time, and that the change I am experiencing right now is just the change of this moment and that this moment will change into the next and the next, the less need I will have to clutch in fear.
Sharon Weil
#79. Zen is the study of mind in all of its manifestations. The purpose of Zen is to be happy.
Frederick Lenz
#80. There is a sense of competition in Zen. You are competing with your thoughts and trying to overcome them.
Frederick Lenz
#81. Other dragons are bastards. I moved out of my mother's cave after my mother tried to rip my guts out.
Granted, I had tried to steal her Tiara of Clairvoyance.
Zen Cho
#82. It's kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven.
Peter Watts
#83. Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.
Alan Watts
#84. In Zen there is a sense of blending, of stepping out of your body and mind and gaining access to powers and abilities that are far beyond the minds of mortal men.
Frederick Lenz
#85. The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there. -Yasutani Roshi, Zen master (1885-1973)
Yasutani Roshi
#86. Do not desperately seek refuge in heaven and delve in blissful ignorance; discover the fires and infernos of hell that have sprung inside of you.
Forrest Curran
#87. If you have mindfulness, if you feel safe, you recognize that you have plenty of conditions to be happy already, and that you don't need to run into the future in order to get a few more conditions.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#88. I love road trips. You get into this Zen rhythm; throw sense of time out the window.
Miriam Toews
#89. This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner. Be very very careful about this point. If you start to practice zazen, you will begin to appreciate your beginner's mind. It is the secret of Zen practice.
Shunryu Suzuki
#90. After macrobiotics, Zen, and channeling, the "poor Vanishing Indian" is once more the subject of "deep and meaningful conversation" in the high rises.
Mary Brave Bird
#91. The Zen expression "Kill the Buddha!" means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself.
Peter Matthiessen
#92. I made a photograph of a garden in Kyoto, the Zen garden, which is a rectangle. But a photograph taken from any one point will not show, well it shows a rectangle, but not with ninety degree angles.
David Hockney
#93. If you want to study Zen, you should forget all your previous ideas and just practice zazen and see what kind of experience you have in your practice. That is naturalness.
Shunryu Suzuki
#94. 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
#95. A female may be poor or delicate or a spinster, but it does seem ill-advised of Miss Liddiard to combine all three.
Zen Cho
#96. The zenith of the peak of mountains has to be balanced by the nadir of the depth of the seas.
Ackshat Deoli
#97. The bookcases were lined with titles, hundreds of books shelved by subject in alphabetical order.-Everything from aberrant behavior to the mysteries of zen.
Tami Hoag
#98. 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
#99. Meditation is to be aware of what is going on: in your body, in your feelings, in your mind, and in the world.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#100. To escape from the world means that one's mind is not concerned with the opinions of the world.
Dogen
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