For man is always bound so long as he depends for his happiness on a partial experience; joy must always give way to sorrow, otherwise it can never be known as joy.

The present situation within and around oneself is Tao, for the present moment is life. Our memory of the past is contained in it as well as the potentiality of the future.

The whole situation in and around at this instant is a harmony with which you have to find your own union if you are able to be in accord with Tao. When you have discovered your own union with it, you will be in the state of Te, sometimes rendered as "virue" or "grace" or "power,' but best understood as Tao realized in man.

[W]u-wei means "nondoing" simply in the sense that by no action of our own can we bring ourselves into harmony with Tao, for [...] the secret of this harmony in the moment is not action but acceptance of a harmony already achieved by Tao itself. We do not alter the actual situation; but our attitude toward it undergoes a change whereby we feel harmony where before we felt discord.

[F]ire is not evil because it burns your fingers if you try to catch hold of it; it is only dangerous.

[L]ife and death are in conflict only in the mind which creates a war between them out of its own desires and fears. In fact life and death are not opposed but complementary, being the two essential factors of a greater life that is made up of living and dying just as melody is produced by the sounding and silencing of individual notes.

To hate death and change is trying to make life deathless and changeless, and this is rigid. moribund, living death

[N]othing that is isolated can live, since the two most important characteristics of life are circulation and change.

A great Zen master said just before he died, "From the bathtub, to the bathtub, I have uttered stuff and nonsense." The bathtub in which the baby is washed at birth, the bathtub in which the corpse is washed before burial, all this time I have said much nonsense.