Tag: Stones on the Path

“I saw the whole idea of spiritual renunciation as a kind of joke, trying to make oneself let go of ordinary life and pleasures. In fact, nirvana is so open and joyful, is so much more than any of the small pleasures we grasp after. You don’t renounce the world, you gain the world.”
~A western master

“I never look at the masses as my responsibility; I look at the individual. I can only love one person at a time — just one, one, one. So you begin. I begin — I picked up one person. Maybe if I didn’t pick up that one person, I wouldn’t have picked up forty-two thousand…. The same thing goes for you, the same thing in your family, the same thing in your church, your community. Just begin — one, one, one.”
~Mother Teresa

“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.”
~Sir Isaac Newton

“What is the straight within the bent?”
~Zen koan

“If you want to understand Zen easily, just be mindless, wherever you are, twenty-four hours a day, until you spontaneously merge with the way. This is what an ancient worthy called ‘the mind not touching things, the steps no placed anywhere.'”
~Ying-an

“The hallmark of a realized person is lightness and briskness.”
~Yamada Roshi

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
~Carl Gustav Jung

“One day a student asked Taiga, ‘What is the most difficult part of painting?’
Taiga answered: “The part of the paper where nothing is painted is the most difficult.'”
~Artist Zen

“I embrace emerging experience. I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector.”
~William Stafford

“How do you think of not-thinking? Nonthinking. This is the heart of zazen.”
~Dōgen