To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.

Basically, there is simply nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe.

The state of nirvana means the blown-out state -- the relieved state - the sigh of relief. Nirvana may be translated into English as WHEW!

Cultural renewal comes about when highly differentiated cultures mix.

One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.

To go out of your mind at least once a day is tremendously important. By going out of your mind, you come to your senses.

Everything is perpetually becoming new.

The Highest to which people can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes them wonder, let them be content; nothing higher can it give them, and nothing further should they seek for behind it; there is the limit.

Taoists do not look upon meditation as 'practice,' except in the sense that a doctor 'practices' medicine. They have no design to subjugate or alter the universe by force or willpower, for their art is entirely to go along with the flow of things in an intelligent way.

Indeed, the world is not unlike a vast Rorschach blot which we read according to our inner disposition, in such a way that our interpretations say far more about ourselves than about the blot.

As a human being it is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses.

The materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.

Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and our world.

Buddhism ... is not a culture but a critique of culture, an enduring nonviolent revolution or loyal opposition to the culture in which it is involved.

But the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker, of the ego trying to watch the mind without interfering.

The self-styled practical man of affairs who pooh-poohs philosophy as a lot of windy notions is himself a pragmatist or a positivist, and a bad one at that, since he has given no thought to his position.

To succeed is always to fail -- in the sense that the more one succeeds in anything, the greater is the need to go on succeeding. To eat is to survive to be hungry.

Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up.

When life is empty, with respect to the past, and aimless, with respect to the future, the vacuum is filled by the present -- normally reduced to a hairline, a split second in which there is no time for anything to happen.