Quote

Not to be bound by rules, but to be creating one's own rules-this is the kind of life which Zen is trying to have us live.

D.T. Suzuki

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

D.T. Suzuki
Creating
Live
Trying
Kind
Life
Bound
Bounds
Rules

More quotes by D.T. Suzuki

Image
Zen is the spirit of a man. Zen believes in his inner purity and goodness. Whatever is superadded or violently torn away, injures the wholesomeness of the spirit. Zen, therefore, is emphatically against all religious conventionalism.
D.T. Suzuki
Image
The truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect.
D.T. Suzuki
Image
To live - is that not enough?
D.T. Suzuki
Image
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?
D.T. Suzuki
Image
One has not understood until one has forgotten it.
D.T. Suzuki
Image
The mind has first to be attuned to the Unconscious.
D.T. Suzuki
Image
Though perhaps less universally known than such figures as Einstein or Gandhi (who became symbols of our time) Daisetz Suzuki was no less remarkable a man than these. And though his work may not have had such resounding and public effect, he contributed no little to the spiritual and intellectual revolution of our time.
D.T. Suzuki
Image
Suzuki's works on Zen Buddhism are among the best contributions to the knowledge of living Buddhism... We cannot be sufficiently grateful to the author, first for the fact of his having brought Zen closer to Western understanding, and secondly for the manner in which he has achieved this task.
D.T. Suzuki
Image
Zen wants us to acquire an entirely new point of view whereby to look into the mysteries of life and the secrets of nature. This is because Zen has come to the definite conclusion that the ordinary logical process of reasoning is powerless to give final satisfaction to our deepest spiritual needs.
D.T. Suzuki
Image
Because since the beginningless past we are running after objects, not knowing where our Self is, we lose track of the Original Mind and are tormented all the time by the threatening objective world, regarding it as good or bad, true or false, agreeable or disagreeable. We are thus slaves of things and circumstances.
D.T. Suzuki
Image
Zen professes itself to be the spirit of Buddhism, but in fact it is the spirit of all religions and philosophies.
D.T. Suzuki
Image
The claim of the Zen followers that they are transmitting the essence of Buddhism is based on their belief that Zen takes hold of the enlivening spirit of the Buddha, stripped of all its historical and doctrinal garments.
D.T. Suzuki
Image
The mistake consists in our splitting into two what is really and absolutely one. Is not life one as we live it, which we cut to pieces by recklessly applying the murderous knife of intellectual surgery?
D.T. Suzuki
Image
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. All great artists, all great religious leaders, and all great social reformers have come out of the intensest struggles which they fought bravely, quite frequently in tears and with bleeding hearts
D.T. Suzuki
Image
Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.
D.T. Suzuki
Image
Prophecy is rash, but it may be that the publication of D.T. Suzuki's first Essays in Zen Buddhism in 1927 will seem to future generations as great an intellectual event as William of Moerbeke's Latin translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century or Marsiglio Ficino's of Plato in the fifteenth.
D.T. Suzuki
Image
The waters are in motion, but the moon retains its serenity.
D.T. Suzuki
Image
Let the intellect alone, it has its usefulness in its proper sphere, but let it not interfere with the flowing of the life-stream.
D.T. Suzuki
Image
You ought to know how to rise above the trivialities of life, in which most people are found drowning themselves.
D.T. Suzuki
Image
Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.
D.T. Suzuki