Quote collecting

I picked up a 'quote-of-the day' zen calendar Jan 1, and when there is a quote I particularly like, I snip it out and tack it up... pretty much wallpapered the spot behind my desk with these gems.

Stay close to any sounds that make you glad you are alive.

-       Hafiz

 

What is truly a part of our spiritual path is that which brings us alive. If gardening brings us alive, that is part of our path, if it is music, if it is conversation… we must follow what brings us alive.

-       David Steindl-Rast

 

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some if it with you.

-       Joseph Joubert

 

At one time you were a mountain, you were a cloud. This is not poetry, this is science.

-       Thich Nhat Hanh

 

Know that joy is rarer, more difficult , and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.

-       Andre Gide

 

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

-       Ernest Hemingway

 

People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they are not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.

-       Dalai Lama

 

Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply,

-       Steven Covey

 

We take things very personally. The more tightly we hold self, the more problem. No self, well… no problem.

-       Hima-Tyana Dhamma Loka

 

When you can laugh at yourself, there is enlightenment

-       Shunryu Suzuki

 

Attention is the rarest and purist form of generosity.

-       Simone Weil

 

I live in the open mindedness of not knowing enough about anything.

-       Mary Oliver

 

This very moment is the perfect teacher, and lucky for us it’s with us wherever we are.

-       Pema Chodron

 

Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time.

-       Hermann Hesse

 

Every situation – nay, every moment – is of infinite worth, for it is the representative of a whole eternity.

-       Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

Right now a moment of time is fleeting by. Capture its reality in paint! To do that we must put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment.

-       Paul Cezanne

 

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of inner stillness.

-       James McNeill Whistler

 

Conceive of nothing while I give you heaven.

-       Jack Kerouac

 

Though I do not believe a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.

-       Henry David Thoreau

 

Reality continues to ruin my life.

-       Bill Watterson

 

I used to believe in reincarnation, but that was in a past life.

-       Paul Krassner

 

If you understand — things are as they are. If you do not understand — things are just as they are.

-       Zen saying

 

What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The greatest revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark…

-       Virginia Wolf

 

Be careful how you interpret the world: it is like that.

-       Erich Heller

 

 

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place… Nothing outside can give you any place…. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.

-       Flannery O’Connor

 

I am larger, better than I thought! I did not know I held so much goodness!

-       Walt Whitman

 

You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.

-       Rumi

 

You deal with your crap by sitting with it. By breathing right into it. You don’t try to ignore it with pleasant thoughts or lofty ideas, and you don’t try to bury it with solutions. You deal with it, work with it, one breath at a time. You hold it right there, in your hara, or breathing centre. You don’t try to breathe it out; you don’t try to breathe it in. You keep it suspended in your diaphragm like a burning-hot coin. Your problems won’t change; only you can change. That’s the point.

-       Shozan Jack Haubner

 

- this one is not from the Zen calendar, but it could be -

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities crept in. Forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day: you shall begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

-       Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.

-       Hunter S. Thompson

 

Everything we do is futile, but we must do it anyway.

-       Mahatma Gandhi

 

Just try to be a good person. That’s enough.

-       The Dalia Lama

 

Where does a thought go when it is forgotten?

-       Sigmund Freud

 

Nowhere, now here!

-       Soen Nakagawa’s word play