“Between our two lives there is also the life of the cherry blossom.”

No matter where your interest lies, you will not be able to accomplish anything unless you bring your deepest devotion to it.

A weathered skeleton in windy fields of memory, piercing like a knife.

Every moment of life is the last, every poem is a death poem.

Come, butterfly It’s late- We’ve miles to go together.

How I long to see among dawn flowers, the face of God.

April’s air stirs in Willow-leaves, a butterfly Floats and balances.

There is nothing you can see that is not a flower; there is nothing you can think that is not the moon.

I hope to have gathered To repay your kindness The willow leaves Scattered in the garden.

A flute with no holes is not a flute.

Go to the object. Leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Do not impose yourself on the object. Become one with the object. Plunge deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there.

Learn how to listen as things speak for themselves.

A thicket of summer grass / Is all that remains / Of the dreams of ancient warriors.

For this lovely bowl let us arrange these flowers since there is no rice.

Old dark sleepy pool… Quick unexpected frog Goes plop! Watersplash!

Old pond, frog jumps in – plop.

The journey itself is my home.

The first virtue of a young man today – that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers – is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.

Everything is possible through God, and I’m living proof of that.

Heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives! You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace.

What I’m trying to do is fulfill what my father said, which is, ‘We have to find a way to live together as brothers and sisters, or together we’re going to perish as fools.’

If Martin [Luther King, Jr.]’s philosophy had been embraced and lived out in Iraq and other places, we wouldn’t have bin Ladens.

I never, in any city I’ve ever been in, never remember the names of streets. The longest place I ever lived in was for five years and I didn’t know the name of the next street over.

[On being indecisive and changeable:] On my gravestone I want inscribed: ‘On the other hand, maybe I should have lived.

I have this theory that, depending on your attitude, your life doesn’t have to become this ridiculous charade that it seems so many people end up living.