Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.

Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.

The basic idea of Zen is to come in touch with the inner workings of our being, and to do this in the most direct way possible, without resorting to anything external or superadded.

In the spiritual world there are no time divisions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense.

To live – is that not enough? To love – is that not everything?

When the mind is ready to understand, the truth will come to meet it.

The practice of Zen is forgetting the self in the act of uniting with something.

Personal experience is everything in Zen. No ideas are intelligible to those who have no backing of experience.

The truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect.

In Zen there must be satori; there must be a general mental upheaval which destroys the old accumulations of intellection and lays down the foundation for a new life.

Zen proposes its solution by directly appealing to facts of personal experience and not to book-knowledge.

The real purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes.

Zen is not necessarily against words, but it is well aware of their limitations.

Life is an art, and like perfect art it should be self-forgetting.

The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull's-eye which confronts him. This state of unconsciousness is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill.

The role of Zen is neither to stand above life nor to run away from it, but to face it with a spirit of determination.

The idea of Zen is to catch life as it flows. There is nothing extraordinary or mysterious about Zen. I raise my hand; I take a book from the other side of the desk; I hear the boys playing ball outside my window; I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighboring wood: all these I do in Zen.

Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.

The more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with the deepening of your character you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life.

The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics.