Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it -...

So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop...

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

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.