Zen Quotes
Zen is an experience of feeling relaxed and peacefulness. zen is peace from the mind. Following are some great Zen quotes.
1. “The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth. Stop talking and thinking and there is nothing you will not be able to know.”
– Sengstan
2. “Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road to the Gate.”
– Huang Po
3. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.”– Rumi
4. “Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
– Alan Watts
5. “The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
– J. Krishnamurti
6. “Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free: Stay centred by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.”
– Zhuangzi
7. “Once you stop clinging and let things be, you’ll be free, even of birth and death. You’ll transform everything.”
– Bodhidharma
8. “The things I carry are my thoughts. That’s it. They are the only weight. My thoughts determine whether I am free and light or burdened.”
– Kamal Ravikant
9. “Do not be trapped by the need to achieve anything. This way, you achieve everything.”
– Frank Herbert
10. “You must only concentrate on the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom, and the next, and the next. Nothing else.”
– Michael Ende
Zen Quotes
11. “If you want something then you lose everything. If you don’t want anything then you already have everything.”
– Seungsahn
12. “Stress is caused by being ‘here’ but wanting to be ‘there’.”
– Eckhart Tolle
13. “We have to face the pain we have been running from. In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us.”
– Joko Beck
14. “If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.”
– Bruce Lee
15. “Don’t think of what you have to do, don’t consider how to carry it out!” he exclaimed. “The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise.”
– Eugen Herrigel
16. “We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.”
– Lao Tzu
17. “Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.”
– Ray Bradbury
18. “If moment by moment you can keep your mind clear then nothing will confuse you.”
– Sheng-yen
19. “When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world. Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness.”
– Eckhart Tolle
20. “It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.”
– Epictetus
Zen Quotes
21. “It’s tremendously liberating when you don’t take things so personally.”
– Jack Kornfield
22. “The future is a concept – it doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be because time is always now … We find there is only present, only an eternal now.”
– Alan Watts
23. “All I can guarantee you is that as long as you are searching for happiness, you will remain unhappy.”
– U.G. Krishnamurti
24. “We don’t mature through age; we mature in awareness.”
– Byron Katie
25. “Every moment I shape my destiny with a chisel. I am a carpenter of my own soul.”
– Rumi
26. “Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is, in fact, the reservoir of infinite possibilities.”
– Daisetz Suzuki
27. “Letting go is the lesson. Letting go is always the lesson. Have you ever noticed how much of our agony is all tied up with craving and loss?”
– Susan Gordon Lydon
28. “Being attached to someone is not about the other person. It is about your own sense of inadequacy.”
– Sadhguru
29. “Balance is the perfect state of still water. Let that be our model. It remains quiet within and is not disturbed on the surface.”
– Confucius
30. “It may look as if the situation is creating the suffering, but ultimately this is not so – your resistance is.”
– Eckhart Tolle
Zen Quotes
Simple Steps: How Zen Lifestyle Can Make Your Life Easier
31. “The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see.”
– Huang Po
32. “The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes.”
– Shunryu Suzuki
33. “A mind that worries about the past is distracted, and a mind that worries about the future is delusional.”
– Cheng Yen
34. “The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
– Alan Watts
35. “Do you realize how many good things are coming. you haven’t even lived some of the best days of your WHOLE LIFE YET. relax , it’ll be okay.”
– Kinley B
36. “Life isn’t as serious as the mind makes it out to be.”
– Eckhart Tolle
37. “The breath is always present. It lives and dies so quickly it doesn’t have time to occupy thoughts.”
– Psil Silva
38. “Everything that happens to you is a form of instruction if you pay attention.”
– Robert Greene
39. “For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
40. “When you blame, you open up a world of excuses, because as long as you’re looking outside, you miss the opportunity to look inside, and you continue to suffer.”
– Donna Quesada
Zen Quotes
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41. “Do not permit the events of your daily lives to bind you, but never withdraw yourselves from them. Only by acting thus can you earn the title of ‘A Liberated One’.”
– Huang Po
42. “A lily or a rose never pretends, and its beauty is that it is what it is.”
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
43. “It is simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts, passing before you. Just witnessing, not interfering not even judging, because the moment you judge you have lost the pure witness.”
– Osho
44. “Enlightenment is not something you achieve. It is the absence of something. All your life you have been going forward after something, pursuing some goal. Enlightenment is dropping all that.”
– Joko Beck
45. “The function of the brain is to serve the present and the real, not to send man chasing wildly after the phantom of the future.”
– Alan Watts
46. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
– Shunryu Suzuki
47. “A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams.”
– Yamamoto Tsunetomo
48. “Pursue not the outer entanglements; Dwell not in the inner void; Be serene in the oneness of things; And dualism vanishes by itself.”
– Sengstan
49. “Letting go takes a lot of courage sometimes. But once you let go, happiness comes very quickly. You won’t have to go around search for it.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
50. “I don’t mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom. It is a timeless spiritual truth: release attachment to outcomes, deep inside yourself, you’ll feel good no matter what.”
– J. Krishnamurti
Zen Quotes
51. “When you catch yourself slipping into a pool of negativity, notice how it derives from nothing other than resistance to the current situation.”
– Donna Quesada
52. “Why do you so earnestly seek the truth in distant places? Look for delusion and truth in the bottom of your own heart.”
– Ryokan
53. “We are not noble by birth. We are noble only by virtue of the way we think, speak, and act.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
54. “A great man is hard on himself; a small man is hard on others.”
– Confucius
55. “You are already that which you seek.”
– Ramana Maharshi
56. “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”
– Pema Chödrön
57. “Being at peace should be your natural state. Not a goal to achieve.”
58. “It’s beautiful to be alone. To be alone does not mean to be lonely. it means the mind is not influenced and contaminated by society.”
– J. Krishnamurti
59. “People of this world are deluded. They’re always longing for something-always, in a word, seeking.”
– Bodhidharma
60. “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything.”
– Shunryu Suzuki
Zen Quotes
Zen
61. “When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.”
– Shunryu Suzuki
62. “Your soul has a beautiful light inside it, don’t ever dim it for anyone.”
63. “All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.”
– Eckhart Tolle
64. “Act without expectation.”
– Lao Tzu
65. “I follow four dictates: face it, accept it, deal with it, then let it go.”
– Sheng Yen
66. “As a bee gathering nectar does not harm or disturb the color and fragrance of the flower; so do the wise move through the world.”
– Buddha
67. “A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool because he has to say something.”
– Plato
68. “Do not follow the ideas which others intend for you, but listen to the voice within you, because life is a projection of how you are inside.”
69. “The way of Zen is to become independent and strong. Don’t rely on others for perceptions of life and truth. Do it individually.”
– Frederick Lenz
70. “Attack the evil that is within yourself, rather than attacking the evil that is in others.”
– Confucius
Zen Quotes
71. “There is nothing to seek and nothing to find. We leap into the dark only to discover how firmly we are rooted in the ground.”
– Marty Rubin
72. “If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to. If you aren’t afraid of dying, there is nothing you can’t achieve.”
– Lao Tzu
73. “Greater awareness brings about a greater appreciation of the people, places, and things in our lives. The more observant we are, the richer our daily experiences become.”
– Ernest Cadorin
74. “A clear mind leads to better judgement, leads to a better outcome.”
– Naval Ravikant
75. “If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.”
– Rabindranath Tagore
76. “Don’t waste your time chasing butterflies. Mend your garden, and the butterflies will come.”
– Mario Quintana
77. “Nothing divides one so much as thought.”
– R H Blyth
78. “Lose yourself in nothing to become everything; Relax into an infinite deep sea of coherent energy; Keep unfolding deeper and deeper into oneness; Continuously let go of control; Feel greater and greater degrees of wholeness.”
– Joe Dispenza
79. “One loses joy and happiness in the attempt to possess them.”
– Masanobu Fukuoka
80. “If you are under control, you lose the danger of glimpsing an unknown realm.”
– Kazuaki Tanahashi
Zen Quotes
81. “Keep your heart clear and transparent, And you will never be bound. A single disturbed thought creates ten thousand distractions.”
– Ryokan
82. “Everything we perceive to be solid and static is made up of almost entirely empty space.”
– Joseph P. Kauffman
83. “The ignorant mind, with its infinite afflictions, passions, and evils, is rooted in the three poisons. Greed, anger, and delusion.”
– Bodhidharma
84. “Taoism is a way of liberation, which never comes by means of revolution, since it is notorious that most revolutions establish worse tyrannies than they destroy.”
– Alan Watts
85. “The saint is a man who disciplines his ego. The sage is a man who rids himself of his ego.”
– Wei Wu Wei
86. “Wherever you are, be there totally.”
– Eckhart Tolle
87. “I knew I was on the right path when I started feeling peace in situations where I would normally feel tension.”
– yung pueblo
88. “When thoughts arise, then do all things arise. When thoughts vanish, then do all things vanish.”
– Huang Po
89. “Your healing starts when you start to forgive and you start growing the moment you let go.”
90. “Zen teaches that once we can open up to the inevitability of our demise, we can begin to transform that situation and lighten up about it.”
– Allen Klein
Zen Quotes
91. “Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.”
– Eckhart Tolle
92. “A flower falls even though we love it and a weed grows even though we do not love it.”
– Dogen Zenji
93. “True Love is when you are able to see yourself in another, when you recognize that there is no separation between you and any other Being in the Universe.”
– Joseph P. Kauffman
94. “You can be anything you want to be as long as you know who you are. Paradoxically, once you realize this, you begin to lose your sense of self.”
– Todd Crawshaw
95. “When you start living day by day, you feel less stress for the future and you learn to let go on things you can’t control.”
96. “With silence comes mindfulness, and thus we become better at choosing our words with kind intent before we express them.”
– Alaric Hutchinson
97. “You are just as connected to the Universe as a finger is to a hand, or as a branch is to a tree. The entire cosmos is expressing itself through your being.”
– Joseph P. Kauffman
98. “We frequently attempt to drive the experience we need to have, rather than permitting the experience we were intended to have, and in doing this, we ignore any new knowledge.”
99. “Until we find the main solution for our misery and realize our real essence, our confusions will keep on showing itself in our surroundings.”
100. “Zen practice is to open up our small mind.”
– Shunryu Suzuki
Also read : Letting go can make you unstoppable.
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