Saints need sinners.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

I owe my solitude to other people.

But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.

Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver.

And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing

But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.

A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.

The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can...

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

Faith is a state of openness or trust.