Z Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with Z. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Zen means the truth that is revealed through simple living. In the acquisitive society, we tend to have too many personal possessions, responsibilities, engagements, and entertainments. The big secret is that our quality of life has deteriorated because we are crushed by the weight of all these. There is so much to do and so little time to do it! Our situation is not unlike going on a tour where the tourist guide has scheduled too many sites to visit. Instead of increasing our enjoyment of the tour, the cramming actually diminishes it.”
Source: The Zen Teachings of Jesus
“Zen meditation is meant to bring an end to the delusory and destructive ego, not to serve it as a means for achieving its ends.”
Source: Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism
“Zen movement is a meditative practice.”
Source: Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
“Zen opens a man's eyes to the greatest mystery as it is daily and hourly performed; it enlarges the heart to embrace eternity of time and infinity of space in its every palpitation; it makes us live in the world as if walking in the garden of Eden”
“Zen particularly regards rational inquiry and academic scholarship as a hindrance along the way of enlightenment. The life story we told earlier of Hui-neng makes the Sixth Patriarch completely illiterate. Although this part of the story is contradicted by other reports giving testimony to his intimate knowledge of the sutras, this illiteracy is taken as a criterion for the authenticity of his way of Zen.”
Source: Zen Enlightenment: Origins And Meaning
“Zen people almost never talk about hell or sin. For the real problem is ignorance, especially ignorance about our true identity.”
Source: The Zen Teachings of Jesus
“Zen people don't bother about logic; they live the ultimate paradox. They go on saying there is no teaching and truth cannot be taught, and still Zen Masters are there and Zen disciples are there. And people have raised questions, skeptical people have always raised questions that: "What is this? On the one hand you say truth cannot be taught, and on the other hand why you initiate, why you accept people?" And the Zen Masters have always laughed, because this paradox cannot be explained. If you want to know it really you have to become a disciple, you have to become a participant, you have to become part of the mystery; only then you will have the taste of it. It is a taste; no explanation can help.”
Source: I am that
“Zen people love Buddha so tremendously that they can even play jokes upon him. It is out of great love; they are not afraid.”
“Zen phrase says The instant you speak about a thing you miss the mark.”
“Zen practice asks you not to worry about who you 'should' become. Find out who you are right now.”
“Zen practice is about not getting high on anything and in so doing getting high on absolutely everything. We then find that everything we encounter - bliss or nonbliss - possesses a tremendous depth and beauty that we usually miss.”
Source: Sex, Sin, and Zen: Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between
“Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.”
“Zen probably won’t solve a single one of our problems. What it might do is help us relate differently to what we consider problems.”
Source: Kill Your Self: Life After Ego
“Zen professes itself to be the spirit of Buddhism, but in fact it is the spirit of all religions and philosophies.”
Source: An Introduction to Zen Buddhism
“Zen provides a structure that supports our exploring the practice and the teachings for ourselves.”
Source: The Beginner's Guide to Zen Buddhism
“Zen purposes to discipline the mind itself, to make it its own master, through an insight into its proper nature. This getting into the real nature of one's own mind or soul is the fundamental object of Zen Buddhism. Zen, therefore, is more than meditation and Dhyana in its ordinary sense. The discipline of Zen consists in opening the mental eye in order to look into the very reason of existence.”
Source: An Introduction to Zen Buddhism
“Zen's failure to resist and renounce intolerance and militarism is ironically derivative of traditional principles when misunderstood or when applied, sometimes purposefully, in an inappropriate way.”
Source: Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?
“Zen says everything is divine so how can anything be special? All is special. Nothing is non-special so nothing can be special.”
“Zen says God is not extrinsic, it is intrinsic. It is not there, it is here. And God is not then, God is now — and there is no other time. There is no other space. This moment is all. In this moment the whole existence converges, in this moment God is available here & now.”
“Zen says that if you drop knowledge - and within knowledge everything is included; your name, your identity, everything, because this has been given to you by others - if you drop all that has been given by others, you will have a totally different quality to your being: innocence. This will be a crucifixion of the persona, the personality, and there will be a resurrection of your innocence. You will become a child again, reborn.”
“Zen says: be empty. Look without any idea. Look into the nature of things but with no idea, with no prejudice, with no presupposition.”
“Zen students see themselves as athletes. Their competitive sport is enlightenment; only with enlightenment do we compete.”
“Zen takes the opposite tack; it holds that true reality is the fundamental unity of mind and matter, inner spirit and external world. When life is viewed in such terms, there can be no success or failure, happiness or unhappiness; life is a whole, and you are simply part of it. There are no dualities, hence there is nothing to worry about. The result is perfect tranquility.”
“Zen taught me how to pay attention, how to delve, how to question and enter, how to stay with -- or at least want to try to stay with -- whatever is going on.”
“Zen teacher Jakusho Kwong suggests becoming “an active participant in loss.” We’re conditioned to seek only gain, to be happy, and to try to satisfy all our desires, he explains. But even though we may understand on some level that loss is a catalyst for growth, most people still believe it to be the opposite of gain and to be avoided at all costs. If I’ve learned anything in my years of practicing Zen and coaching basketball, it’s that what we resist persists.”
“Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.”
“Zen teaches that once we can open up to the inevitability of our demise, we can begin to transform that situation and lighten up about it.”
“Zen teaches that our approach to today determines our whole approach to life.”
“Zen: The art of living contentedly in the present, this is the natural state of consciousness for cats and can be learned by contemplating your kitty.”
Source: Cat Talk A Lighthearted Look at Living with Cats
“Zen turns the light of introspection inward and pursues the question, “What am I?”
Source: Zen: The Authentic Gate
“Zen values the simple, concrete, living facts of everyday direct personal experience.”
Source: Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness
“Zen Wander: The helper seeks to help others because he knows what it is to be helpless.”
“Zen wants us to acquire an entirely new point of view whereby to look into the mysteries of life and the secrets of nature. This is because Zen has come to the definite conclusion that the ordinary logical process of reasoning is powerless to give final satisfaction to our deepest spiritual needs.”
Source: An Introduction to Zen Buddhism
“Zen was a reaction. Just as Buddha came into the world and spoke against the fall of Vedanta, so Buddhism lost its essence and became ritual. Zen was a reaction to that.”
“Zen was an attempt to get back to the purest teachings of the Buddha -enlightenment without strings.”
“Zen Wisdom cannot be obtained by the intellect: study, hypothesis, analysis, synthesis. The practitioner of Zen must use all of his entire being as an instrument of realization; the intellect is only one part of his being, and a part that often pulls him away from living reality, the very object of Zen.”
Source: Zen Keys: A Guide to Zen Practice
“Zen would say that in adopting, too completely, the scientific view of reality we have closed the door on a more holistic view of life and are limiting ourselves to a rather mundane view of something altogether extraordinary.
Zen maintains that our dualistic view of life means that whatever we perceive goes through our mental filtering systems before being cognitively understood. We use mental boxes for all aspects of our daily lives so we can make sense of our world and interact with oth- ers. With the development of language, though, this cognitive grasp of reality means that everything we perceive is subject to these men- tal processes, and so from early childhood we lose the ability to directly perceive the world. This is the point where dualism starts.”
Source: Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence - Understanding the Zen Philosophy of Beauty in Simplicity
“Zen's greatest contribution is to give you an alternative to the serious man. The serious man has made the world, the serious man has made all the religions. He has created all the philosophies, all the cultures, all the moralities; everything that exists around you is a creation of the serious man. Zen has dropped out of the serious world. It has created a world of its own which is very playful, full of laughter, where even great masters behave like children.”
“Zen, in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one's own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom. By making us drink right from the fountain of life it liberates us from all the yokes under which we finite beings are usually suffering in this world.”
Source: Essays in Zen Buddhism
“Zen, like life, defies exact definition, but its essence is the experience, moment by moment, of our own existence -- a natural, spontaneous encounter, unclouded by the suppositions and expectations that come between us and reality. It is, if you like, a paring down of life until we see it as it really is, free from our illusions; it is merely a divestment of ourselves until we recognize our own true nature.”
“Zen, on the other hand, is not so dogmatically sterile, though there are certainly traces and more than traces of this austerity. However, with Zen we have not only the void, but the fertile void. The ink lines in a sumi-e painting show this fertility of the void ever ready to brim over into existence.”
“Zen... does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.”
“Zengin insan günleri birbirine benzemeyen insandı.”
Source: Üç İstanbul
“Zenginin sadece daha pahalı bir ayakkabıya ihtiyacı var, fakat fakirin sadece bir ayakkabıya ihtiyacı var!”
“Zenginler fakirleri her görmezden geldiklerinde fakirleşirler! En fakir kişi, başkalarına yardım edebilecek bütün imkânlara sahip olan fakat etmemeyi tercih edendir!”
“Zenginlik insana ait bir özellik değil" diyorum. "Para insanın doğal bir parçası değil; kaybolabilir, çalınabilir, soyut bir kavram, birtakım sıfırlar... Zaten hayatta anlamlı olan değerler parayla sahip olunamayanlar. Kitap, çalışacak insan, eşya alabilirsin; ama bunlar bilginin, dostluğun, paylaşma duygusunun yerini tutamaz. Oysa zengin aptallar paranın çok önemli olduğunu sanıyorlar, bu yüzden de servetlerinin kendilerine ruhsal bir ayrıcalık, özel bir mutluluk getirmesini bekliyorlar. Bu mümkün olmayınca, içleri de boş olduğu için can sıkıntısı başlıyor.”
Source: Kardeşimin Hikâyesi
“ZENITH / NOON beats out / on its solar anvil / the rays of light”
“ZENITH, n. The point in the heavens directly overhead to a man standing or a growing cabbage. A man in bed or a cabbage in the pot is not considered as having a zenith, though Horizontalists hold that the posture of the body was immaterial.”
Source: The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World
“Zeno first started that doctrine, that knavery is the best defence against a knave.”
Source: Plutarch's Morals
“Zeno was concerned with three problems... These are the problem of the infinitesimal, the infinite, and continuity.”