When you practice zazen you should not try to attain anything. You should just sit in the complete calmness of your mind and not rely on anything.

Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes.

The Noble Eightfold Path is not a path of mere intellectual understanding but a path of practice, of inner transformation.

The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.

The Buddha's teaching is a teaching of self-reliance, of being one's own master, one's own refuge.

Mindfulness is being aware of what is happening right now, without wishing it were different.

Compassion is the radicalism of our time.

Awareness is always with us. We don't need to create it or achieve it - we just need to recognize what's already there.

Nothing can harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts.

Do not mistake understanding for realization, and do not mistake realization for liberation.

Just as a mother would protect her only child with her life, even so let one cultivate a boundless love towards all beings.

The period of greatest gain in knowledge and experience is the most difficult period in one's life.

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.

When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.

The whole path of mindfulness is about letting go. We let go of our attachment to our views, our attachment to our opinions, our attachment to our ideas.

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

The most important thing is to enjoy your life - to be happy. This is the goal of Buddhist practice.

In the monastery of your body, the monk of your mind must stay in retreat.

The mind creates the abyss, and the heart crosses it.

Our own life has to be our message.

Because you are alive, everything is possible.

When I run from suffering, it follows me. When I face suffering with equanimity, it runs from me.

Not by hatred is hatred conquered, but by love alone. This is an eternal law.

Each breath is a new beginning, a fresh opportunity to awaken.

Breathing in, I calm body and mind. Breathing out, I smile.

Misery ceases to exist when we stop reacting to sensations.

The practice of mindfulness is simply to bring awareness to what we are doing, what we are saying, and what we are thinking.

Vipassana is the art of living. Not the art of escaping.

Karma is not fate but the law of moral causation, showing us that we are the architects of our own destiny.

The biggest prison is the one we build in our own mind.

The challenge in meditation is not to eliminate thinking but to understand the nature of thought itself.

The measure of success in spiritual life is how peaceful you are.

What you are is what you have been. What you'll be is what you do now.