Zen Life Quotes

I steeled myself for the next response. I knew it was going to be one of the Zen life lessons. [ ... ]
Instead he kissed me. ~ Richelle Mead

Detachment is ...
Not lack of love,
but a lack of dependency.
Not lack of passion,
but a lack of attachment
to permanency.
Not lack of security,
but a lack of anxiety
in uncertainty. ~ Drishti Bablani

Life is beautiful. Live every day in the present. Be grateful for who you are and appreciate the world around you. ~ Independent Zen

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing. ~ Meister Eckhart

If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it? ~ Dogen

The way out is through the door. Why is it that no one will use this method? ~ Confucius

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become. ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink, night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things ... When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living. To do this twenty-four hours a day is the Way of Haiku. It is having life more abundantly. ~ R.H. Blyth

The most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your two feet. ~ Shunryu Suzuki

Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. ~ Gautama Buddha

Time is the source of all things ~ Sunday Adelaja

I think you're asking too much. You know what I have? Toward this Pris android?"
"Empathy," he said.
"Something like that. Identification; there goes I. My god; maybe that's what'll happen. In the confusion you'll retire me, not her. And she can go back to Seattle and live my life. I never felt this way before. We are machines, stamped out like bottle caps. It's an illusion that I - I personally - really exist; I'm just representative of a type."
He could not help being amused; Rachael had become so mawkishly morose. "Ants don't feel like that," he said, "and they're physically identical."
"Ants. They don't feel period."
"Identical human twins. They don't - "
"But they identify with each other; I understand they have an empathic, special bond. ~ Philip K. Dick

Our early dating life consisted of trying to figure out whether we were dating. ~ Mariska Hargitay

In fairy tales, there were always ogres or evil queens or circumstances to be overcome. But in real life, you could give everything you had, everything you were, for someone, and still fall short. ~ Kit Rocha

I've built walls too steep for any man to climb. I'm caged. My heart is that cage. It's always been my strength and weakness. Unfortunately, feeling emotions so strongly has worked against me most of my life. There's ~ Kathryn Perez

You think you must fit the role others have laid out for you. That is the lie you need to conquer. ~ Elizabeth Carlton

My whole life, I heard, 'Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg.' It's all I heard throughout elementary school. ~ Robin Lord Taylor

Line by line, page by page, you write the chapters of your life... Tomorrow is the beginning of a new chapter--a new scene in your life--with the hope of a good ending. Make every keystroke count. ~ Mike Coe

To divide one's life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings. ~ Clifton Fadiman

Like Israel, New York City's history has been defined by immigrants who come in search of freedom and the opportunity to build a better life. And like Israel, New York City has remained a target for terrorists who seek to destroy that freedom ~ Michael Bloomberg

Softball isn't just a game it's away of life. ~ Kevin Kelly

The bizarre trend in mountaineers is not the risk they take, but the large degree to which they value life. They are not crazy because they don't dare, they're crazy because they do. These people tend to enjoy life to the fullest, laugh the hardest, travel the most, and work the least. ~ Lisa Morgan

If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions. ~ Catherine Drinker Bowen

When you give with love it will give you confidence to give more and share more. ~ Debasish Mridha

SPRING Somewhere a black bear has just risen from sleep and is staring down the mountain. All night in the brisk and shallow restlessness of early spring I think of her, her four black fists flicking the gravel, her tongue like a red fire touching the grass, the cold water. There is only one question: how to love this world. I think of her rising like a black and leafy ledge to sharpen her claws against the silence of the trees. Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting; all day I think of her - her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love. ~ Mary Oliver

A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. You must break out of your current comfort zone and become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown. ~ Dennis Waitley

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand. ~ Neil Armstrong

The tension between 'yes' and 'no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot', makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self. ~ Anatole Broyard

He gathered me closer, kissed my neck, then spoke in a low voice next to my ear. I figure, see, if you find yourself getting more attached to the two of us than you planned, maybe you won't think about picking up and leaving to start another life somewhere else. ~ Jenn Bennett

Make your pain productive and you can transform tragedy into triumph. ~ Jaeda DeWalt

Scarlet watched a leaf fall to the ground, lying dead amoung the other leaves on the forest floor. "A brief life seems pointless."
Tristan thought for a moment. "Isn't that what life is, though? A brief opportunity to exist? A short gift? ~ Chelsea Fine

You can change anything you want to change, and you can do it very fast. That's another satanic suckerpunch - that it takes years and years and eons of eternity to repent. It takes exactly as long to repent as it takes you to say, 'I'll change' - and mean it. . . . You may well spend - indeed you had better spend - the rest of your life proving your repentance by its permanence. But change, growth, renewal, and repentance can come for you as instantaneously as for Alma and the sons of Mosiah. ~ Robert Reynolds

I just never felt so fantastically rocky in my entire life. ~ J.D. Salinger

I am light. I am not invisible when I look in the mirror - I am my own light that will shine, shine, and shine. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

Some people in this life really enjoy being sent up and Nicholas Parsons is one of them because he's a sadomasochist. ~ Derek Nimmo

Writing is like life: it goes on. ~ Marty Rubin

The fact is, the contest has always been invulnerability, and even when you win, you still lose. ~ Brenna Yovanoff

Sometimes when you experience something wonderful, everything else loses its shine. ~ M.E. Vaughan

Let us be grateful and express gratitude for all those beauties and magic of our life. ~ Debasish Mridha

Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life. ~ Charles Yu

If a gift has come to you wrapped in obligations and tied tightly with a ribbon of guilt, then it's not really a gift at all. It's a manipulation. A gift should be something freely given that enhances your life and reminds you lovingly of the giver. If it's not, you simply should not give it a place in your home. ~ Peter Walsh

The struggle to excavate your true, authentic self from beneath the mountain of conditioning and ridiculous expectation is the epic struggle of your lifetime. ~ Bryant McGill

Gandhi was a strange guy. There was this simplistic manner; but nobody knows what it cost to provide the simple life of Mohandas Gandhi. Nobody. He traveled on a train by himself. ~ David Douglas Duncan

Right View cannot be described. We can only point in the correct direction. Right View cannot even be transmitted by a teacher. A teacher can help us identify the seed of Right View that is already in our garden, and help us have the confidence to practice, to entrust that seed to the soil of our daily life. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh