My life is my message.
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.
I respect the man who knows distinctly what he wishes. The greater part of all the mischief in the world arises from the fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims. They have undertaken to build a tower, and spend no more labor on the foundation than would be necessary to erect a hut.
As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with the individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look around and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself. But since nobody seems to know what to do, it might be worthwhile for each of us to ask himself whether by any chance his or her unconscious may know something that will help us. Certainly the conscious mind seems unable to do anything useful in this respect. Man today is painfully aware that neither his great religions nor his various philosophies seems to provide him with those powerful animating ideas that would give him the security he needs in the face of the present condition of the world.
When you exhale you must exhale all of Mt. Baldy [a Zen center at which the questioner had spent the winter]. When you inhale you must inhale all of this world. If you think about combining the two, that is misleading. Instead you have to realize that there are two separate lives. It is wrong to set up the self and try to adjust the outside world to it. Instead, give the self to both worlds which are real and necessary. At one time, you must leave your girl friend and live alone. At the other time you must be with her. To be alone and to be together these can be freely repeated. That is real life. To go to the toilet is done by the self and to eat food is also done by the self. Americans think, “Which is the real self, to go to the toilet or to eat?” You are doing both.
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
If you’re going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art. A youngster told me recently that he was going to give himself a year to see if he has talent. A year! It takes a lifetime to see if you have it. Painting is a total engagement.
We are what we pretend to be.
One is not rich by what one owns, but more by what one is able to do without with dignity.
I love her and she loves me and together we hate each other with a wild hatred born of love.
People need a little loving and, God, sometimes it’s sad all the shit they have to go through to find some.
Any pitcher who throws at a batter and deliberately tries to hit him is a Communist.
Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring to him an unexpected boyishness.
The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?
The fabled musk deer searches the world over for the source of the scent which comes from itself.
