Koun Yamada

I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.

Being neededdoes not entail selfish pride or unhealthy attachment to the worldly esteem of others. Rather, it consists of a natural human hunger to serve our fellow men and women.

Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Each step along the Buddha’s path to happiness requires practising mindfulness until it becomes part of your daily life.

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.

All beings are by nature Buddha, as ice by nature is water. Apart from water there is no ice; apart from beings, no Buddha.

I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

Be the witness of your thoughts. You are what observes, not what you observe.

To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him.

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.

Only when you can be extremely pliable and soft can you be extremely hard and strong.

You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

Harmonizing opposites by going back to their source is the distinctive quality of the Zen attitude, the Middle Way: embracing contradictions, making a synthesis of them, achieving balance.