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Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.

D.T. Suzuki

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D.T. Suzuki
Plumage
Borrowed
Unless
Grows
Knowledge
Really

More quotes by D.T. Suzuki

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When we start to feel anxious or depressed, instead of asking, What do I need to get to be happy? The question becomes, What am I doing to disturb the inner peace that I already have?
D.T. Suzuki
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Zen professes itself to be the spirit of Buddhism, but in fact it is the spirit of all religions and philosophies.
D.T. Suzuki
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Zen has nothing to teach us in the way of intellectual analysis nor has it any set doctrines which are imposed on its followers for acceptance.
D.T. Suzuki
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Dhyana is retaining one's tranquil state of mind in any circumstance, unfavorable as well as favorable, and not being disturbed or frustrated even when adverse conditions present themselves one after another.
D.T. Suzuki
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Art always has something of the unconscious about it.
D.T. Suzuki
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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
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To Zen, time and eternity are one.
D.T. Suzuki
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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
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Unless we agree to suffer we cannot be free from suffering.
D.T. Suzuki
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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
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Facts of experience are valued in Zen more than representations, symbols, and concepts-that is to say, substance is everything in Zen and form nothing.
D.T. Suzuki
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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.
D.T. Suzuki
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Fundamentally the marksman aims at himself.
D.T. Suzuki
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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. By making us drink right from the fountain of life it liberates us from all the yokes under which we finite beings are usually suffering in this world.
D.T. Suzuki
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The worst passion we mortals cherish is the desire to possess. Even when we know that our final destination is a hole not more than three feet square, we have the strongest craving
D.T. Suzuki
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Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.
D.T. Suzuki
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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
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Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.
D.T. Suzuki
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The truth of Zen, just a little bit of it, is what turns one's humdrum life, a life of monotonous, uninspiring commonplaceness, into one of art, full of genuine inner creativity.
D.T. Suzuki
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The fighter is to be always single-minded with one object in view: to fight, looking neither backward nor sidewise. To go straight forward in order to crush the enemy is all that is necessary for him.
D.T. Suzuki