Zen Poetry Quotes

#1. I am an architect. I try to feel the transparency in contemporary buildings and I try to understand the transparency in Zen poetry. I just want to mix all those things.

Luis Gonzalez

#2. I'd love to give you something
but what would help?

Ikkyu

#3. Don't wait for the man standing in the
snow
to cut off his arm help him now

Ikkyu

#4. Men endured so much for war, but for peace they dared nothing.

Olaf Stapledon

#5. Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days' worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.

Ryokan

#6. Hearing a crow with no mouth
Cry in the deep
Darkness of the night,
I feel a longing for
My father before he was born.

Ikkyu

#7. Zen has a pronounced iconoclastic tendency, and regards the study of texts, doctrines, and dogmas as a potential hindrance to spiritual awakening, relying instead on humour, spontaneity, unconventionality, poetry, and other forms of artistic expression to communicate the idea of enlightenment

Damien Keown

#8. Zen is not a philosophy, it is poetry. It does not propose, it simply persuades. It does not argue, it simply sings its own song.

Rajneesh

#9. Zen Makes use, to a great extent, of poetical expressions; Zen is wedded to poetry.

D.T. Suzuki

#10. Zen is poetry; poetry is Zen.

Reginald Horace Blyth

#11. My thatched hut;
the whole sky Is its roof
The mountains are its hedge,
And it has the sea for a garden.
I'm inside with nothing at all,
Not even a bag,
And yet there are visitors who say "
It's hidden behind a bamboo door"
- Muso Soseki

Muso Soseki

#12. Born born everything is always born
thinking about it try not to

Ikkyu

#13. I wanted it to provide an escape route, I wanted to make pictures that were fantastic and took you into another world, one that was brighter. I started off with this idea.

David LaChapelle

#14. It isn't that we're alone or not alone
whose voice do you want mine? yours?

Ikkyu

#15. Clouds very high look
not one word helped them get up there

Ikkyu

#16. As you know, Hurricane Sandy has affected thousands of families, leaving them without electricity, without household goods and, in the worst cases, without a home.

Thalia

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

Ikkyu

#18. Haiku is not a shriek, a howl, a sigh, or a yawn; rather, it is the deep breath of life.

Santoka Taneda

#19. We're lost where the mind can't find us
utterly lost

Ikkyu

#20. Chill December brings the sleet, Blazing fire, and Christmas treat.

Sara Coleridge

#21. How much does he lack himself who must have many things?

Sen No Rikyu

#22. The majority of guys that I've met, that I consider confident and sexy, are pretty well rooted in who they are. They know their values and their worth as a person. They know they are intelligent, caring men, and that generates confidence.

Stephanie Beatriz

#23. 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

#24. They were different places in that same relationship, and like anything that's out of alignment, they were destined to crash sooner or later.

Jodi Picoult

#25. With'n these ribs is / a City of Luminous / all thanks t'you.

Evy Zen

#26. I teach Zen, tantric mysticism, jnana yoga, bhakti yoga, Tibetan mysticism, occultism and psychic development. I also teach poetry and literature, film and many other different things.

Frederick Lenz

#27. In pale moonlight / the wisteria's scent / comes from far away.

Yosa Buson

#28. The love of nature is religion, and that religion is poetry; these three things are one thing. This is the unspoken creed of haiku poets.

R.H. Blyth

#29. 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

#30. I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me.

Sam Hamill