“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”

Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot.

For there is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.

If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black.

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

People become concerned with being more humble than other people.

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

Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.

Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.

A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.

Stay in the center, and you will be ready to move in any direction.

We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.

Human desire tends to be insatiable.

Cut off a wolf’s head and it still has the power to bite.

A dog used to run up quietly to the heels of everyone he met, and to bite them without notice.

Dogs never bite me. Just humans.

Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it.

The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.

Love isn’t soft, like the poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.

Well, I think we tried very hard not to be overconfident, because when you get overconfident, that’s when something snaps up and bites you.