“Just practice good, do good for others, without thinking of making yourself known so that you may gain reward. Really bring benefit to others, gaining nothing for yourself. This is the primary requisite for breaking free of attachments to the Self.”

Realization doesn’t destroy the individual any more than the reflection of the moon breaks a drop of water. A drop of water can reflect the whole sky.

To be in harmony with the wholeness of things is not to have anxiety over imperfections.

There is no beginning to practice nor end to enlightenment; There is no beginning to enlightenment nor end to practice.

Students today should live fully every moment of time. This dew-like life fades away; time speeds swiftly. In this short life of ours, avoid involvement in superfluous things and just study the Way.

In the mundane, nothing is sacred. In sacredness, nothing is mundane.

There are those who, attracted by grass, flowers, mountains, and waters, flow into the Buddha Way.

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.

Truth is not far away. It is nearer than near. There is no need to attain it, since not one of your steps leads away from it.

Just as parents care for their children, you should bear in mind the whole universe.

People who truly follow the Way would do well to conceal the fact that they are Buddhists.

What is reality? An icicle forming in fire.

Cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words, and following after speech.

Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.

Since it is the practice of enlightenment, that practice has no beginning and since it is enlightenment within the practice, that realization has no end.

People like what is not true and they don’t like what is true.

I asked, “What are words?” The tenzo said, “One, two, three, four, five.” I asked again, “What is practice?” “Nothing in the entire universe is hidden.”

There too his responsibility is greatest. There there occurs the emergence of his existential subject, finding out for himself that he has to decide for himself what he is to make of himself.

I would never have had if I’d been fool enough to make them do what I thought they should do.

I think we need to let the old racial order just stay where it is and not seek to improve upon it. Not try to create more racial categories, because all that does is it makes a race stick around longer.

If you make a mistake, celebrate.

I’ve tried to make music that’s more universal, but for me, it’s most successful emotionally when it’s most specific to what I’m going through.

But that would put me on a path that would make me totally divergent from who I am. I don’t have to go through the heartache many other people go through, of figuring out what makes them “wealthy.” I know what brings me joy.

I may make light of being a domestic terrorist, but if they can brand me a domestic terrorist and confiscate all my materials, and then expand into confiscating other people’s materials.

Black history is being comfortable in your own skin no matter what color you are. Black history makes me proud of where I came from and where I am going in life.