The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.

Reality in itself is neither permanent nor impermanent; it cannot be categorized. But when one tries to hold on to it, change is everywhere apparent, since, like one's own shadow, the faster one pursues it, the faster it flees.

The past and the future, are in the present

Taoism is a way of liberation, which never comes by means of revolution, since it is notorious that most revolutions establish worse tyrannies than they destroy.

To succeed is always to fail-in the sense that the more one succeeds in anything, the greater is the need to go on succeeding. To eat is to survive to be hungry.

The knowledge of the past stays with us. To let go is simply to release any images and emotions.

We do not "come into" this world, we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves", as the universe "peoples". Every individual is an expression of the realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals. Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it, but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags of skin.

I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time, a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment, only to vanish forever.

The measuring of worth and success in the terms of time, and the insistent demand for assurances of a promising future, make it impossible to live freely both in the present and in the "promising" future when it arrives. For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.