And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.
—Jean Cocteau
One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?
—Samuel Beckett
The young student said to his master, "Am I in possession of Buddha consciousness?" The master said, "No." The student said, "Well, I've been told that all things are in the possession of Buddha consciousness: the rocks, the trees, the butterflies, the birds, the animals, all beings." The master said, "You are correct. All things are in possession of Buddha consciousness: the rocks, the trees, the butterflies, the bees, the birds, the animals, all beings—but not you." "Not me? Why not?" "Because you are asking this question.
—D. T. Suzuki
What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?
—Woody Allen
The ultimate destiny of the human spirit is a condition in which all identification with the… finite self will disappear.… As a minor dream vanishes completely on awakening, awareness will be eclipsed in the blazing light of total awareness. Some say, "The dewdrop slips into the shining sea." Others say the metaphor would be more accurate if it pictured the ocean as entering the dewdrop itself.
—Huston Smith
The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad.
—Salvador Dali
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked that if you ask a man how much is two plus two and he tells you five, that is a mistake. But if you ask a man how much is two plus two and he tells you ninety-seven, that is no longer a mistake. The man you are talking to is operating with a wholly different logic from your own.
—Thomas Friedman
Either I exist or I do not exist, and no amount of pap which I happen to be lapping can dull me to the loss.
—William Carlos Williams
The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.
—Yasutani Roshi
And did you get what you wanted from this life even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
—Raymond Carver
Our lives don't really belong to us, you see—they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.
—Paul Auster
Nonattachment is not the elimination of desire. It is the spaciousness to allow any quality of mind, any thought or feeling, to arise without closing around it, without eliminating the pure witness of being. It is an active receptivity to life.
—Stephen Levine
He [writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton] wasn't a dour monk at all.… I often went down to visit him at the monastery in Kentucky. The abbott would give him a day off, and I'd rent a car.… We would stop in the woods and he'd change into his farm worker's blue jeans and a beret to hide his tonsure. Then we'd hit the bars across Kentucky. He loved beer, and he loved that smoked ham they have down there. He was a wonderful person. He wanted to read contemporary writers, but the books were often confiscated, so we had a secret system. I sent the books he wanted to the monastery psychiatrist in Louisville, who would get them to Merton.… Once I asked him, "Tom, why do you stay here? You could get out and be a tremendous success in the world. " He answered that the monastery was where God wanted him to be.
—James Laughlin
There it is. I don't believe in anything, but I'm always glad to wake up in the morning. It doesn't depress me. I'm never depressed. My basic nervous system is filled with this optimism. It's mad, I know, because it's optimism about nothing. I think of life as meaningless and yet it excites me. I always think something marvelous is about to happen.
—Francis Bacon
If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness.… The whole show has been on fire from the word go.
—Annie Dillard