"Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do,
is for yourself--and there isn't one." 
             Wei Wu Wei
 

 
What matters?
 
 
 

Be here now.
              Ram Dass
 
 

The only thing that keeps us from happiness is searching for it.
              Lama Surya Das
 
 

Religion is the art of learning to live in amazement.
              Abraham Joshua Heschel
 
 

The Enlightened One comes and says ‘Here’s the key.
All you have to do is take it and
put it in the hole there underneath the door handle,
turn it to the right, turn the handle, open the door,
walk out, and you’re free.’
But you might be so used to being locked up in prison
that you didn’t quite understand the directions
and you say, ‘Oh, the Lord has given me this key’
and you hang it on the wall and pray to it every day.”
                          Ajahn Sumedho
 

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
If, to the human mind's imaginings,
Silence and solitude were vacancy?
              Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Mont Blanc"




To see infinity in a blade of glass,
Eternity in an hour.
          William Blake, "Proverbs of Hell"




How wonderful it would be if one could only be worthy of hearing the 
song of the grass.  Each blade of grass sings out to God without any 
ulterior motive and without expecting any reward.  It is most wonderful 
to hear its song and worship God in its midst.
          R. Nachman of Bratzlav




What's the point of forgetting, if it's followed by dying?
          Joseph Brodsky




Everything is worthy of notice,
For everything may be interpreted.
          Hermann Hesse




Zen is the unsymbolization of the world.
          R.H. Blyth

And in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times,
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those that know secret things,
or else alone.
          Rilke
 

As long as you imagine yourself to be in control,
you should imagine yourself to be responsible.
          Nisargadatta
 
 

As human gods aim for their mark,
make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark;
It’s easy to see without looking too far
Not much is really sacred.
          Bob Dylan
 
 

Good represents the reality of which God is the dream.
          Iris Murdoch
 
 

Two things I've said recently:
This journey is the strangest one – each step is the destination.
Maybe my life has gone off the rails – but who said life should have rails?

         

Only connect.
          E.M. Forster


One night as I walked in the desert, the mountains rode on my shoulders.
          Mira



It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth
when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
          H.L. Mencken
 
 

The divine longing is Good seeking good for the sake of the Good.
                  Dionysius the Areopagite
 
 

That which loves God is God.
                   Farahuddin ‘Iraqi

People get stupid in a wholesale way; they get wiser in a retail way.
                  Read in the NY Times
 

To say the name of God, we must first know it.
To know the name of God, we must first hear it.
To hear the name of God, we must listen deeply.
To listen in this manner is to say the very name itself.
                  Zen teaching, quoted by Oren Sofer
 

Mysticism is not how the world is, but that it is.
          Ludwig Wittgenstein




We dance around in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
          Robert Frost, "The Secret Sits"




The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
          Gerard Manley Hopkins



Map is not territory.



The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and 
the circumference is nowhere.
          Empedocles
 
 

We are not humans having a spiritual experience; we are spirits having a human experience.
                   Anon.

Instead of reading a poem, I could live a poem.  Do I dare?
              Matthew Eisenfeld (1971-1996)




We're a capital couple are Bloom and I.
He brightens the Earth, I polish the sky.
              The Soap, in "Circe," James Joyce, Ulysses



The sentence in which God gets mixed in with words is not 'I believe in God'.
It is the 'here I am' said to a neighbor to whom I am given over, 
by which I announce peace, that is, my responsibility for the other.
          Emmanuel Levinas





Dear Landlord, please don’t put a price on my soul.
                    Bob Dylan




If belief in God means able to speak OF him in the third person, 
I do not believe in God.  If belief in him means beaing able to speak TO him,
I believe in God.
          Martin Buber




The only true emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream.
          Wallace Stevens, "The Emperor of Ice Cream.




The world is full of light and mysteries both wonderful and awesome,
but our tiny little hand shades our eyes and prevents them from seeing.
                    Nachman of Bratzlav

The only zen you find on the tops of mountains is the zen that brings 
you there.
          Robert Pirsig

Every evil condition is a temptation to accept some power apart from the power of God.
          Lorraine Sinkler

In music, in the sea, in a flower, in a leaf, in an act of kindness
. . . I see what people call God in all these things.
          Pablo Casals




All intellectuals complain about their school days.
This is ridiculous.
     Lord Clark



Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions,
a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.
     Freda Adler



If you give a man a fire, he'll be warm for a day. 
If you set a man on fire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
     Perry Metzger

The best things in life are free.  Yeah? Well so are some of the worst, and I don't see
anyone throwing a party when they get cancer.
         maddox.xmission.com




They are not skillful considerers of human things, 
who imagine to remove sin by removing the matter of sin.
     John Milton




The children know when they're lied to, and their curiosity piqued, 
their distrust fueled, their cowardice assumed and their resourcefulness 
implicitly challenged by the transparent agitprop of their elders, 
they seek out the forbidden pleasures with an assiduousness unknown 
to the dissolute of more liberal states.
      James Wetterau




Our life is frittered away by detail...
Simplify, simplify
          Henry David Thoreau





When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste.
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long-since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
  But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
  All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.
          William Shakespeare, Sonnet 30

If you are not failing a lot, you are probably not being as creative as you could be.
                 John Backus, inventor of FORTRAN



Both speech and silence transgress.
          The Little Zen Companion




Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while
A great wind is bearing me across the sky.
          Ojibwa saying, in The Little Zen Companion

Please feel free to email me any of your own zettel, reactions, or criticisms.
Last update June 2004.

Back to homepage.