Way Of Zen Quotes

Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality. ~ Alan W. Watts

The way of nothingness is the way of Zen. It is just a term. The contemplation of nothingness or everythingness is where everything starts. ~ Frederick Lenz

The way of Zen is to become independent and strong. Don't rely on others for perceptions of life and truth. Do it individually. Go to a teacher of Zen to learn how to do that, not to get answers for individual life situations. ~ Frederick Lenz

Those who can sit perfectly physically usually take more time to obtain the true way of Zen, the actual feeling of Zen, the marrow of Zen. ~ Shunryu Suzuki

Those who sit perfectly physically usually take more time to obtain the true way of Zen. ~ Shunryu Suzuki

Mild-mannered Abe, however, is Tarzan of the traffic jungle. He knows the strict species pecking order: pedestrians are on the bottom and run out of the way of everything, bicycles make way to cycle-rickshaws, which give way to auto-rickshaws, which stop for cars, which are subservient to trucks. Buses stop for one thing and one thing only. Not customers - they jump on while the buses are still moving. The only thing that can stop a bus is the king of the road, the lord of the jungle and the top dog.
The holy cow. ~ Sarah Macdonald

Old feelings had a way of resurfacing just when you thought they were gone forever ~ Amy Harmon

They say love is all about raging hormones. For me, it's mind's way of breaking through its self-imposed limitations in order to set the eternally ecstatic soul free. ~ Saurabh Sharma

I think in our time, you know, so much of the information we get is pre-polarized. Fiction has a way of reminding us that we actually are very similar in our emotions and our neurology and our desires and our fears, so I think it's a nice way to neutralize that polarization. ~ George Saunders

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth. ~ W. H. Auden

Our world will never be changed until individuals have changed, and individuals will never change until religion as inner transformation has penetrated to the hearts of their beings and made them into new persons. Change happens one human being at a time. It is your transformation, my transformation, that will make a difference in this wondrous but troubled world of ours, as we become who we truly are. ~ Theodore J. Nottingham

The market has a simple way of whittling all excessive pride and overblown egos down to size. After all, the whole idea is to be completely objective and recognize what the marketplace is telling you, rather than try to prove that the thing you said or did yesterday or six weeks ago was right. The fastest way to take a bath in the stock market or go broke is to try to prove that you are right and the market is wrong. ~ William O'Neil

I lived in a big bunkhouse of thirty farm workers with Leroy, who was a stranger to me in many ways because he was always talking about unions and unity. But he had a way of explaining the meanings of words in utter simplicity, like "work" which he translated into "power," and "power" into "security." I was drawn to him because I felt that he had lived in many places where the courage of men was tested with the cruelest weapons conceivable. ~ Carlos Bulosan

Never forget that the road to Heaven is the Way of the Cross. Jesus has called us to follow Him, bearing the Cross as He did. ~ Rose Philippine Duchesne

If you have the sense of participation in sports or athletics, of being a player, then you are not really into the Zen mind. In Zen mind there is no sense of self in the play. ~ Frederick Lenz

It is always hard to leave a home a drama a way of life a life. So I sat there warm and safe that night held by the sea and a good man and my own good fortune victim and witness to all the transitory sweetness like Gatsby's dreams that stood before and behind me. ~ Gail Caldwell

If you can stare hard at your problems, they almost always shrink or disappear, because you almost always find a better way of dealing with them than if you don't face them head on. The more difficult the problem, the more important it is that you stare at it and deal with it. ~ Ray Dalio

We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves. ~ Alex Steffen

There are very few friends that will lie down with you on empty streets in the middle of the night, without a word. No questions, no asking why, just quietly lay there with you, observing the stars, until you're ready to get back up on your feet again and walk the last bit home, softly holding your hand as a quiet way of saying "I'm here".
It was a beautiful night. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

A genealogy is a striking way of bringing before us the continuity of God's purpose through the ages. The process of history is not haphazard. There is a purpose in it all. And the purpose is the purpose of God. ~ Leon Morris

The LIFE FROM GOD posture is so appealing because it doesn't ask us to change. What we desire, what we seek, what we do, and how we live - all shaped by consumerism - are not disrupted. Our values and way of life are simply projected onto God and incorporated into a religious system in which we receive divine assistance to meet our desires. In this way LIFE FROM GOD is nothing more than consumerism with a Jesus sticker slapped on the bumper. ~ Skye Jethani

The way of the Cross is not easy, yet it is the tuneful, the rhythmic, the beautiful, the lovely way. ~ Edgar Cayce

There's a deep knowing beneath the epicenter of our anxious asking. Meet me there, & stillness will voice its soothing certainties with us. ~ Curtis Tyrone Jones

War may claim for itself the power to destroy and to clear the ground. It can never construct or create. It is not the means by which ideals are imposed. There is ultimately no way of combating a wrong idea but the setting forth of a right one. ~ Maude Royden

People showed me this way of dealing with music, writing songs, thinking about music and shows and our community and the fact that it doesn't have to be about being popular or fashion or making money. ~ Chuck Ragan

Giving is not God's way of raising money; it is God's way of raising people into the likeness of His Son. ~ Howard Dayton

Slavery, that was a kind of alchemy for such White folk, or so they reckoned. They calculated a way of turning each bead of a Black man's sweat into gold and each moan of despair from a Black woman's throat into the sweet clear sound of a silver coin ringing on the money-changer's table. There was buying and selling of souls in that place. Yet there was nary a one of them who understood the whole price they paid for owning other folk. ~ Orson Scott Card

His cry on the cross was our cry of desperate alienation from God taken up into his and transformed through the resurrection. As we allow ourselves to experience our own pain, we can know that what we feel is Christ suffering in us and redeeming us. Rather than condemning ourselves for our weakness and making self-conscious efforts to try harder, we can allow the Crucified to love us in our brokenness. There is no way of healing from the wounds each of us carries except through the love of Jesus that forgives seventy times seven and keeps no score of our wrongdoing. ~ Brennan Manning

Breathe in, breathe out. All the blessings of the universe that we may overlook are contained in the entirety of a breath. Breathe in, breathe out. Each breath is the sun flowering our earth, fresh water filling our oceans, and the blue skies clearing our minds. Infinite emotions are contained within every breath, and by the breath we can always realize the beauty within it all. Breathe in, breathe out. ~ Forrest Curran

This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don't like at all and would like to avoid. It's not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it's not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can't everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can't go on and on, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it's so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you could survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don't want to go with them, you only don't want them to go. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones. ~ Nathanael Howe

[Believers] are but triflers who, when they cannot explain a thing, run back to the will of God; this is, truly, a ridiculous way of expressing ignorance. ~ Baruch Spinoza

As far back as I can remember, I knew there was something wrong with our way of life when people could be mistreated because of the color of their skin. ~ Rosa Parks

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings. ~ Masanobu Fukuoka

Man is always inclined to regard the small circle in which he lives as the center of the world and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe. But he must give up this vain pretense, this petty provincial way of thinking and judging. ~ Ernst Cassirer

Stand back and accept.'...'Accept that you don't understand anything what is going on around you.'..'Accept that you have no way of even imagining what is happening. And accept your pain, too. And thank God for it. ~ Muriel Maufroy

The hands on the clock never faulted, not for a second. One day ended; and a new began. If there was one thing on this earth that could be counted on, it was that. Time never paused to mourn the dead. That particular privilege is allotted to the living. It is for the survivor to mourn, bury the dead, and leave the rest to the earth.
That is they way of it – the way of death - and the misery it leaves behind. ~ Patti Roberts

I knew there was a way out. I knew there was another kind of life because I had read about it. I knew there were other places, and there was another way of being. ~ Oprah Winfrey

These tools were my parents' way of saying: What you're doing is important. We support it. We want to help you find your way. ~ Aspen Matis

Universal love is really the way of the sage-kings. It is what gives peace to the rulers and sustenance to the people ~ Mozi

By way of parenthesis let me say that this hand on the tomb has a lovely lesson for all those unfortunate members of Christ who have fallen into mortal sin. In them, Jesus lies dead - as dead as he was on this Sabbath of twenty centuries ago. But on them, as on this tomb, the hand of Mary, the Refuge of Sinners, rests, awaiting and praying for the Resurrection of Christ within them! May those who are in such a state fell that hand as they read this book, and bring Christ to life within them by asking Mary to help them make a perfect act of contrition, which is an act of love, this moment. She can grant such a grace; for she is Mediatrix of all grace! ~ M. Raymond

But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes it's by way of heartbreak, sometimes it's by way of injustice, sometimes it's by way of fate. There's an infinite number of ways to examine it. ~ Tom Hanks

TV's not the problem, and I'm tired of it being posed as this antithesis to creativity and productivity. If TV's getting in your way of writing a book, then you don't want to write a book bad enough. ~ Andrea Seigel

If war occurs, that positive adult contact in every shape is needed more than ever. It will be a matter of emotional life and death. There's not a handy one-minute way of talking to your kid about war. ~ Richard Louv

Those who pose, suppose that everything goes the way of the dodos. Yet, I've met, some who bet on luck like a cashed check, that is, before a major wreck. ~ Joel T. McGrath

'West To A Land Of Plenty' shows a family heading west, first on board a train, and then going into areas as yet untamed by rail by way of an ox-drawn wagon. ~ Jim Murphy

I suspect it was ... the old story of the implacable necessity of a man having honour within his own natural spirit. A man cannot live and temper his mettle without such honour. There is deep in him a sense of the heroic quest; and our modern way of life, with its emphasis on security, its distrust of the unknown and its elevation of abstract collective values has repressed the heroic impulse to a degree that may produce the most dangerous consequences. ~ Laurens Van Der Post

The train will not find you. You must find the train, its pulse, its way of being beyond obvious rock and sway. The train's pulse is deeper than movement. If you listen, you will hear the song of the train, and when you find the song, you will find the engine, the heart, the blood, the pulse. This is how we create. ~ Cathleen Margaret

Hard to restrain, unstable is this mind; it flits wherever it lists. Good it is to control the mind. A controlled mind brings happiness. ~ Gautama Buddha

What do you mean by faith? Is faith enough for Man? Should he be satisfied with faith alone? Is there no way of finding out the truth? Is the attitude of faith, of believing in something for which there can be no more than philosophic proof, the true mark of a Christian? ~ Clifford D. Simak