Quotes:

Some of my favorite quotes that I've collected.

If you're stuck on a problem, don't just sit there and think about it. Just start working on it. even if you don't know what you're doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.
~ Chapter 7, Subtle art of not giving a fuck [1]

If there really is no reason to do anything then there is also no reason not to do anything. That in the face of the inevitably of death there is never a reason to give into ones fear or embarrassment or shame. Since its all just a bunch of nothing anyway and that by spending the majority of my short life avoiding what was painfully and uncomfortable I was essentially avoiding being alive at all.
~ Chapter 9, Subtle art of not giving a fuck [1]

You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.
~ Atomic Habits [2]

Every failure brings with it the seed of an equivalent advantage.
~ Think and Grow Rich [3]

Do you know whats cheap? … Flowers. Do you know whats expensive? … Divorce.
~ The Hard Thing About Hard Things [4]

Occasionally, I hear someone say. “I'm so busy that I don't have time to read.” I get it. I used to have that belief as well. But now I think of what my mentor used to say: ”The greatest minds in human history have spent years condensing the best of what they know into a few pages that can be purchased for a few dollars, read in a few hours, and shorten your learning curve by decades. But I get it… you're too busy.
~ Miracle Morning Millionaires [5]

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff that life is made of.
~ Benjamin Franklin [6]

The point, therefore, of these arts is the doing of them rather than the accomplishments. But, more than this, the real joy of them lies in what turns up unintentionally in the course of practice, just as the joy of travel is not nearly so much in getting where one wants to go as in the unsought surprises which occur on the journey.
~ The Way of Zen [7]

When human beings think too carefully and minutely about an action to be taken, they cannot make up their minds in time to act.
~ The Way of Zen [7]

In the end, the only alternative to a shuddering paralysis is to leap into action regardless of the consequences. Action in this spirit may be right or wrong in regards to conventional standards. But our decisions upon the conventional level must be supported by the conviction that whatever we do, and whatever “happens’ to us is ultimately “right”. In other words, we must enter into it without “second thought.” Without the arrière-pensée of regret, hesitancy, doubt, or self-recrimination. Thus when Yun-men was asked, “what is the Tao?” he answered simply, “walk on!”
~ The Way of Zen [7]

The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist - the good without the bad. The gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes. For all these things are a deception of symbols pretending to be realities, and to seek after them is like walking straight into a wall which some painter has, by the convention of perspective, suggested an open passage. In short Zen begins at the point where there is nothing further to seek, nothing to be gained. Zen is most emphatically not to be regarded as a system of self-improvement, or a way of becoming a Buddha. In the words of Lin-chi, “If a man seeks the Buddha, that man loses the Buddha”
~ The Way of Zen [7]

The measuring of worth and success in terms of time, and the insistent demand for assurances of a promising future, make it impossible to live freely both in the present and in the “promising” future when it arrives. For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
~ The Way of Zen [7]

Zen is not a philosophy of not looking where one is going; it is a philosophy of not making where one is going much more important than where one is that there will be no point in going.
~ The Way of Zen [7]

This is just what happens to the human being, to the mind, when the desire for certainty and security prompts identification between the mind and its own image of self. It cannot let go of itself. It feels that it should not do what it is doing, and that it should do what it is not doing. It feels that it should not be what it is, and be what it isn’t. Furthermore, the effort to remain always “good” or “happy” is like trying to hold the thermostat to a constant 70 degrees by making the lower limit the same as the upper.
~ The Way of Zen [7]

The mind cannot act without giving up the impossible attempt to control itself beyond a certain point. It must let go of itself both in the sense of trusting its own memory and reflection, and in the sense of acting spontaneously, on its own into the unknown.
~ The Way of Zen [7]

Whether trusting our memories or trusting the mind to act on its own, it comes to the same thing: ultimately we must act and think, live and die, from a source beyond all “our” knowledge and control. But this source is ourselves, and when we see that, it no longer stands over against us as a threatening object. No amount of care and hesitancy, no amount of introspection and searching of our motives, can make any ultimate difference to the fact that the mind is: Like an eye that sees, but cannot see itself.
~ The Way of Zen [7]

Do I have an intention for being intentional, a purpose for being purposive? Suddenly I realize that my very intention is spontaneous, or that my controlling self-the-ego-arises from my uncontrolled or natural self. At this moment all machinations of the ego come to nought; it is annihilated in its own trap. I see that it is actually impossible not to be spontaneous. For what I cannot help doing I am doing spontaneously, but if I am at the same time trying to control it, I interpret it as a compulsion. As a Zen Master said, “Nothing is left to you at this moment but to have a good laugh,”
~ The Way of Zen [7]

Reality itself has no meaning since it is not a sign. Pointing to something beyond itself. To arrive at reality at “suchness” is to go beyond karma, beyond consequential action, and to enter a life which is completely aimless. Yet to Zen and Taoism alike this is the very life of the universe, which is complete at every moment and does not need to justify itself by aiming at something beyond.
~ The Way of Zen [7]

There is no possibility of departing from the Tao. Neither avoids false thoughts nor seeks the true, for ignorance is in reality the Buddha nature, and this illusory, changeful, empty body is the Dharmakaya. One stops trying to be spontaneous by seeing that it is unnecessary to try, and then there it can happen.
~ The Way of Zen [7]

To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams, wandering nowhere, of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.
~ The Way of Zen [7]

While the zen experience does not imply any specific course of action, since it has no purpose, no motivation. It turns unhesitatingly to anything that presents itself to be done. Mo chih ch'u is the mind functioning without blocks, without “wobbling” between alternatives, and much of zen training consists in confronting the student with dilemmas which he is expected to handle without stopping to deliberate and “choose”
~ The Way of Zen [7]

Zen is not merely a cult of impulsive action. The point of mo chih chu is not to eliminate reflective thought but to eliminate “blocking” in both action and thought, so that the response of the mind is always like a ball in a mountain stream - “one that after another without hesitation.”
~ The Way of Zen [7]

His problem was to resolve the paradox of practicing relentlessly without ever “Trying” and to let go of the taut string intentionally without intention. His master at one and the same time urged him to keep on working and working, but also to stop making an effort. For the art cannot be learned unless the arrow “shoots itself,” unless the string is released wu-hsin and wu-nien, without “mind” and without blocking, or “choice” After all those years of practice there came a day when it just happened how or why herrigel never understand.
~ The Way of Zen [7]

The brush must draw by itself. This cannot happen if one does not practice constantly. But neither can it happen if one makes an effort. Similarly, in swordsmanship one must not first decide upon a certain thrust and then attempt to make it, since by that time it will be too late. Decision and action must be simultaneous
~ The Way of Zen [7]

But so far as Zen is concerned, the end results have nothing to do with it. For , as we have seen all along, Zen has no goal; it is traveling without a point, nowhere to go. To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead, for as our own proverb says, “To travel well is better than to arrive” A world which increasingly consists of destinations without journeys between them, a world which values only “getting somewhere” as fast as possible, becomes a world without substance.
~ The Way of Zen [7]

Sitting meditation is not, as it is often supposed, a spiritual “exercise,” a practice followed for some ulterior object, From a Buddhist standpoint, it is simply the proper way to sit, and it seems perfectly natural to remain sitting so long as there is nothing else to be done, and so long as one is not consumed with nervous agitation. To the restless temperament of the west. Sitting meditation may seem to be an unpleasant discipline, because we do not seem to be able to sit “just to sit” without qualms of conscience, without feeling that we ought to be doing something more important to justify our existence. To propitiate this restless conscience, sitting meditation must therefore be regarded as an exercise, a discipline with an ulterior motive. Yet at that very point it ceases to be meditation in the Buddhist sense, for where there is purpose, where there is seeking and grasping for results, there is no dhyana.
~ The Way of Zen [7]

Wu-wei as “non-doing” is itself the highest form of “doing” and undoing is not the state of being catatonic but rather a skillful choice, a condition of serenity in which one does one's best according to one's ability and the circumstances but also one has the spaciousness to allow things to unfold according to their causes and conditions. One has the wisdom to accept the results of such unfolding without any struggle.
~ Trust in Mind [8]

The goal of the mature Chan tradition is not to answer questions but to dissolve the lust for our addiction to seeking answers and to diminish suffering thereby. In our complex conditioning, we pose metaphysical questions in a way that we are seeking to confirm an answer that we wish to have (e.g.Does God exist?) Despite our protestations, what we are doing is not a search for truth but a solace for our conditioned existence. IT is true, as the saying goes, that the truth shall set you free but what's generally not said is that before it sets you free it will destroy you.(or rather your conditioning) For the Buddha, this shattering of conditioning is tantamount to freedom. And very few people want to experience this shattering. Chan practitioners sought to get out of this shell game.
~ Trust in Mind [8]

For the Taoists, the sage is not one who withdraws into the life of a hermit, but is a man of social and political achievements, although these achievements must be brought about through wu-wei: “non-action” or “taking no [unnatural] action”
~ Trust in Mind [8]

My Zen teacher, when presented with complaints by his students about difficulties of training and discipline, used to say “You make things easy, they are easy. If you make things difficult, they are difficult.” He would further say, “Don’t make things easy, don’t make things difficult. Just do it.” Easy and difficult are conceptual categories in our encounter with the phenomenal world. We set up these categories in self-defining ways and habituate ourselves to view the world through those definitions.
~ Trust in Mind [8]

Those who understand the Tao delight, like cats, in just sitting and watching without any goal or result in mind. But when a cat get tired of sitting, it gets up and goes for a walk or hunts for mice. It does not punish itself or compete with other cats in an endurance test as to how long it can remain immovable - unless there is some real reason for being still, such as catching a bird. Contemplative Taoists will happily sit with yogis and Zenists for as long as it is reasonable and comfortable, but when nature tells us that we are “pushing the river” we will get up and do something else, or even go to sleep. More than this is certainly spiritual pride.
~ Trust in Mind [8]

“Learning how to work” meant developing the capacity for paying attention. It meant learning how to perform tasks with awareness and focus, without becoming distracted by a yearning to be somewhere else or do something more “exciting” something that promised more personal satisfaction.
~ Zen at Work [9]

“Learning how to work” meant that the activity given the name “work” was fundamentally no different than any other activity, each demanding the same complete mindfulness.
~ Zen at Work [9]

Usually when we start to practice, we need self-discipline. We have to encourage ourselves to stay on our cushions when we feel discomfort, to return to our cushions when some other activity beckons, or to drop off our thinking mind during zazen. Self-discipline is needed when we remain stuck to the notion of limitation and lack of capability. If we think “I can't do this.” is the same as saying, “I have a limitation and will not succeed,” But if we have no notion of limitation or success, we don't need self-discipline. The practice and life are very natural.
~ Zen at Work [9]

What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his health? Even if he owned the whole world, he could sleep in only one bed at a time, and eat only three meals a day.
~ How to Stop Worrying and Start Living [10]

I ask for the wisdom to become less fixated. Allowing myself a moment of stillness to let anger and anxiety to dissolve. So that I may appreciate the moment without the distortions we bring into it.
May these insights allow me to experience gratitude for the blessings I have in this fleeting moment. May I be granted the ability to alleviate the suffering found around and within me. [11]

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Quotes:

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