Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal, for the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it exists forever....

Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.

You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.

Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith-in life, in other people, and in oneself-is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.

The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only lovable because they are changing.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

The menu is not the meal.

The problem comes up because we ask the question in the wrong way. We supposed that solids were one thing and space quite another, or just nothing whatever. Then it appeared that space was no mere nothing, because solids couldn't do without it. But the mistake in the beginning was to think of solids and space as two different things, instead of as two aspects of the same thing. The point is that they are different but inseparable, like the front end and the rear end of a cat. Cut them apart, and the cat dies.

Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree.

There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again.

Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself.

The sense of wrong is simply failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs.

To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it.

The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.

But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.

Total situations are, therefore, patterns in time as much as patterns in space.

There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.