The great heresy and the only real heresy is the idea that anything is separate, distinct, and different essentially from other things. That is a wandering from natural fact and law, for nature is nothing if not coordination, cooperation, mutual helpfulness; and the rule of fundamental unity is perfectly universal: everything in the universe lives for everything else.
If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form instead of being impelled by their force.
When your ass itches, scratch it! You gotta be internal, man. . . .
. . . I long for the mantle of the great wanderers, who lighted their steps by the lamp of pure hunger and pure thirst and whichever way they lurched was the way.
Simply to have all the necessities of life and three meals a day will not bring happiness. Happiness is hidden in the unnecessary and in those impractical things that bring delight to the inner person. . . . When we lack proper time for the simple pleasures of life, for the enjoyment of eating, drinking, playing, creating, visiting friends and watching children at play, then we have missed the purpose of life. Not on bread alone do we live but on all these human and heart-hungry luxuries.
Rest does not come from sleeping but from waking.
Disillusion is the last illusion.
The important thing is to know how to take all things quietly.
It is a grave misconception to regard the mystical progress as passing mostly through ecstasies and raptures. On the contrary, it passes just as much through broken hearts and bruised emotions, through painful sacrifices and melancholy renunciations.
You know, I’ve read your last story, and I ought to have returned it weeks ago. It isn’t right. It’s almost right. It almost works. But not quite. You are too literary. You must not be literary. Suppress all the literature and it will work.
It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment or the courage to pay the price. . . .
One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.
Poetry, like the moon, does not advertise anything.
A friend of mine took a Zen Buddhist monk to hear the Boston Symphony perform Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. His comment was, “Not enough silence!”
The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
