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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one's own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom.

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

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.

The mind has first to be attuned to the Unconscious.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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