1,214 Quotes About Zen

It is our perception—of ourselves and of reality—that determines our experience.

We do not need an ashram or church, some secret initiation, a guru’s blessing, or an intentional community. As helpful or supportive as those may be at times, ultimately, what we need is the willingness to look at ourselves honestly, to feel what emotions lie within us, to acknowledge our thoughts and actions, to choose to be aware of what we ignore or suppress, and to let go of what limits and distracts us so we can open ourselves fully to the truth of life in this moment.

To awaken to the truth of our being we have to be willing to look at the illusions that veil us from this truth, and we must be willing to surrender these illusions so we can perceive reality clearly as it is in the present moment.

The way that we experience reality is determined by how our mind perceives reality.

Our perception of reality is not reality itself, but it is the lens through which we view reality. It is like looking outside through a stained-glass window—if we look through red glass, the outside world will appear to be red; if we look through blue glass, the outside world will appear to be blue. The outside world isn’t changing, we are just observing it through different colors of glass, which make it appear to have the same color as whatever color glass that we look through.

All human beings throughout the world are conditioned. It is an obvious and undeniable fact.Yet, many of us are unaware of this fact of our conditioning. We are unaware of the ways in which our culture influences our minds and shapes our perception of reality. We do not realize that most of our thoughts, opinions, and beliefs are not really our own, but were simply inherited by our family and the society that we were raised in.

When you've understood this scripture, throw it away. If you can't understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom.

To remove our beliefs is to open ourselves up to the possibility that everything we know about reality is untrue.

We all have only one true emotional need as human beings, and that is the need to feel loved. The majority of our actions aim towards this goal in one way or another. We seek relationships, we seek fame or success, we act (or don’t act) in certain ways simply because we feel the need to be accepted, the need to be recognized, the need to feel loved. This is a very powerful thing to realize.