Beer: Helping ugly people have sex since 3000 B. C.
Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.
When we start to feel anxious or depressed, instead of asking, "What do I need to get to be happy?" The question becomes, "What am I doing to disturb the inner peace that I already have?"
Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.
The more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with the deepening of your character you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life. All great artists, all great religious leaders, and all great social reformers have come out of the intensest struggles which they fought bravely, quite frequently in tears and with bleeding hearts
Thought creates things by slicing up reality into small bits that it can easily grasp. Thus when you are think-ing you are thing-ing. Thought does not report things, it distorts reality to create things, and as Bergson noted, "In so doing it allows what is the very essence of the real to escape. " Thus to the extent we actually imagine a world of discrete and separate things, conceptions have become perceptions, and we have in this manner populated our universe with nothing but ghosts.
The truth of Zen, just a little bit of it, is what turns one's humdrum life, a life of monotonous, uninspiring commonplaceness, into one of art, full of genuine inner creativity.
I've done a ton of theater work and dramatic work, but nobody really knows me that way.
Now the truth is that the Spirit is within you and you are the Spirit. You are the beauty, the bliss and the joy of that Spirit. That's what you are. Because your attention is not there, that's why you cannot feel your Spirit. But your Spirit exists; it is within you, in your heart, waiting for a moment to come into your conscious mind, to be felt by you in your central nervous system. It's all there, built within you.
The goal of theology is the worship of God. The posture of theology is on one's knees. The mode of theology is repentance.
The fact that Judge [Samuel] Alito is such a baseball fan gives me even more confidence that he knows the proper role of a judge.