Bodhidharma

Buddha means awareness, the awareness of body and mind that prevents evil from arising in either.

We’ve had the goddam Ages of Faith, we’ve had the goddam Age of Reason. This is the Age of Publicity.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock and roll or Christianity.

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.

It is a naked city. Faith is not pampered, nor hope encouraged; there is no place to lay one’s exhaustion: but instead pinnacles skewer it undisguised against vacancy.

What is a soul? It’s like electricity – we don’t really know what it is, but it’s a force that can light a room.

Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine. – Shunryu Suzuki

Our whole spiritual transformation brings us to the point where we realize in our own being, we are enough.

I’m essentially agnostic. I don’t have a problem with God. I have a problem with religion. I’ve chosen to live my life without the certainties of religious faith. I think they’re dangerous. Music is something that gives my life value and spiritual solace.

I feel the presence of a higher power. I believe that what you give is what you get. It’s universal law. I believe in the power of prayer and of words. I’ve learned that when you predict that negative things will happen, they do.

Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.

The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.

If we could get all religions together on a common purpose-the elimination of jealousies and the things that make men covet another’s belongings, we would be a long way toward the goal of outmoding war, depression and poverty.

What about Jesus Christ? I say that he was a precursor of idealists; a precursor of socialists.

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.