Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.
Never am I less alone than when I am by myself, never am I more active than when I do nothing.
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else.
All of life is the exercise of risk.
Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.
As far as the Buddha nature is concerned, there is no difference between sinner and sage. . . . One enlightened thought and one is a Buddha, one foolish thought and one is an ordinary man.
If you use It, It will make you live. If you don’t, It will destroy you.
God is my ground, I am God’s ground.
Illusion. First there is the illusion of perfect accord, then revelation by experience of the many differences, and then I come upon a crossroad, and unless there is a definite betrayal, I finally accept the complete person.
The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments.
Once upon a time a man whose axe was missing suspected his neighbor’s son.
The boy walked like a thief, looked like a thief, and spoke like a thief.
But the man found his axe while digging in the valley, and the next time he saw his neighbor’s son, the boy walked, looked, and spoke like any other child.
There is a time for expanding and a time for contraction; one provokes the other and the other calls for the return of the first. . . . Never are we nearer the Light than when darkness is deepest.
Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go; first of all in your own home. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next-door neighbor.
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is the awe and circumspection proper to them that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ORDINARY people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
And that’s where death comes in. You’re choosing to be blown around in the wind. It’s bad to be blown around in the wind if you don’t know it. Then it’s very important to have some center of gravity. In art that would be a style, the way you want yourself to sound — your own way of playing. But then you’ve got to throw it away and be blown around. That’s where real art begins, and for most people, they’ve never even thought of that. They’d say, “Who would recognize what I was playing?” But why are people so concerned with being recognized?
