 The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present. |
| Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it. |
| In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way. |
| Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by somekind of cosmic lawgiver. |
| The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention. |
| The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens. |
| Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations. |
| Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it's just doing it. |
| But to me nothing - the negative, the empty - is exceedingly powerful. |
| And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment. |
| Saints need sinners. |
| The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible. |
| So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself. |
| But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything. |
| You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes. |
| So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing. |
| The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. |
| You don't look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you. |
| Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command. |
| Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know. |
