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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?

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

What Zen wants us to do is to acquire an entirely new point of view whereby to look into the mysteries of life and the secrets of nature.

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

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

The mind has first to be attuned to the Unconscious.

Zen is a way of life, not a theory or a piece of knowledge to be stored away in our minds.

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

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

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.