We join spokes together in a wheel, but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move. We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable. We work with being, but non-being is what we use.
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.
Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.
No! Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.
The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.
No one should ever ask themselves that: why am I unhappy? The question carries within it the virus that will destroy everything. If we ask that question, it means we want to find out what makes us happy. If what makes us happy is different from what we have now, then we must either change once and for all or stay as we are, feeling even more unhappy.
He died that day because his body had served its purpose. His soul had done what it came to do, learned what it came to learn, and then was free to leave.
Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.
All knowledge is worth having.
Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.
We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged
It's no good trying to get rid of your own aloneness. You've got to stick to it all your life. Only at times, at times, the gap will be filled in. At times! But you have to wait for the times. Accept your own aloneness and stick to it, all your life. And then accept the times when the gap is filled in, when they come. But they've got to come. You can't force them.
No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.
When a man learns to love, he must bear the risk of hatred.
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.
When someone sees the same people every day, as had happened with him at the seminary, they wind up becoming a part of that person's life. And then they want the person to change. If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.
Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.
