1,972 Quotes About Buddhism

If you have sugarcane, you can make sugar or jaggery. You can't turn it into rice.Accept the limits of your limited self so that your limitless inner self can take you to the rice field.

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.

You don't value things that easily come to you. You value things that are hard to get. You keep running after them and complain, "Why are things I desire hard to get?

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.