Tao and Nirvana are only names for an experience; those who invented them had the experience first and gave it its name afterward, but now people are so busy learning about the names that they forget the experience.

Zen concentrates on the importance of seeing into one's own nature now at this moment - not in five minutes when you have had time to "accept" yourself, nor ten years ahead when you have had time to retire to the mountains and meditate.

The free man walks straight ahead; he has no hesitations and never looks behind, for he knows that there is nothing in the future and nothing in the past that can shake his freedom.Freedom does not belong to him; it is no more his property than the wind, and as he does not possess it he is not possessed by it. And because he never looks behind his actions are said to leave no trace, like the passage of a bird through air.

There is no greater freedom than the freedom to be what you are now.

[T]he creations of man, his art, his literature, his buildings, differ only in quality, not in kind, from such creations of nature as birds, nests and honeycombs.

All men suffer [...], but not all are unhappy, for unhappiness is a reaction to suffering, not suffering itself.

[A]ny attempt to discover happiness is also an easy way to go crazy, and the world today is a crazy place just because people are trying to do it. We are a collection of people running wildly round in circles in frantic pursuit of our own selves, and the picture is not particularly edifying,[...] It is like trying to mend a hole in one part of a handkerchief by taking a patch from another. For the trouble is that all our schemes, systems, and devices are partial.

We see God every time we open our eyes; we inhale Him at every breath; we use His strength in every movement of our finger; we think Him in every thought, although we may not think of Him, and we taste Him in every bite of food.

[T]he wisdom of the East has a strictly practical aim which is not mere knowledge about the universe; it aims at a transformation of the individual and of his feeling for life through experience rather than belief. This experience is psychological or spiritual, not metaphysical, and except in certain specialized fields has no relation to occultism or to what we understand in the West as philosophy.