"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." John Muir

“Making the  simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple… that's creativity.”  Charles Mingus

“Anything you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness possesses you, and in this materialistic age a great many of us are possessed by our possessions.” Peace Pilgrim

"You can't fix a corrupt system by taking it's money. “ Bernie Sanders

“The Self far transcends all things. Even if the whole universe tumbled down, I would have no misgivings. Thought all the buddhas in the ten directions might appear before me, I would not rejoice. Even thought the three hells might appear before me, I would have no fear, since there is nothing I dislike.” Linji. The Records of Linji

"If the glass of water in your mind is completely full, it will flow over when you receive more. You have to empty that glass of water - that means to throw away your personal ideas and ego attachments. Only thus can you develop an attitude that allows you to listen to and accept everything that your true teacher offers to you." Sawaki Kodo Roshi

“It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.” Johnathon Franzen

"We have outrun an educational system framed in simpler days and for simpler conditions. The pressure comes hard enough on the teachers but far harder upon the taught, who suffer in 100 different ways." Sir William Osler

"Our task is to see and accept the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. " SN Goenka

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair

"Don't be caught up in the skillfulness of words. " Dōgen

“A nation can be considered great when it defends liberty as Lincoln did, when it fosters a culture which enables people to dream of full rights for all their brothers and sisters as Martin Luther King sought to do, when it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work, the fruit of a faith which becomes dialogue and sows peace in the contemplative style of Thomas Merton.” Pope Francis

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.” Herman Goering

“We all need the illusion of control. Just like the seawalls and trophy homes. We need to preserve the myth that we’re in charge. We don’t like to face the fact that we’re as vulnerable as skunks or shorebirds. But nature teaches that uncertainty and chance are enormous factors in the lives of animals, and it just so happens that we are animals. If we admit that, it may not solve anything, but at least it has the advantage of being honest. And if we admit how truly vulnerable we are, then humility isn’t just the wise choice, it’s the obvious one.” John Hay

“Hate the sinner but not the sin.” Ghandi

“By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day. “ Robert Frost 

“Giving life doesn’t only mean to be killed. Giving life, having the martyr’s spirit, means giving while doing our duty, in silence, in prayer, while we honestly fulfill our duty.” Archbishop Oscar Romero

“Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” Haruki Murakami

"When you live completely in each moment, without expecting anything, you have no idea of time.” Shunryu Suzuki 

“One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am, A reluctant enthusiast, a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of your self and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it, while you can, while it is still here. So you get out and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forest, encounter the grizzly, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head, firmly attached to your body, active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you sweet victory over your enemies, over those desk-bound people with their hearts in a safe-deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk–top computers. I promise you this: YOU WILL OUTLIVE THE BASTARDS!” Edward Abbey

"The greatest remedy for anger is delay.” Thomas Paine

“Look deep into nature and you will understand everything better.” Albert Einstein

“The death of a cloud is also the birth of rain.” Thich Nhat Hanh

“The greatest scientists are artists as well.” Albert Einstein

“ The most alive is the wildest. “ Henry David Thoreau 

“Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism.” Daniel J Levitin. The Organized Mind.

“The self is still present- but it is not self-preoccupied. It washes the dishes and puts them away.” Robert Aiken

“Gain is delusion; loss is enlightenment.” Kodo Sawaki Roshi

“Enlightenment is precisely the thorough abandonment of any notion of enlightenment.” Barry Magid. Ordinary Mind.

“Never believe that what you know is absolute truth.” Thich Nhat Hanh

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead

“If one’s life is simple, contentment has to come. Simplicity is extremely important for happiness.” Dali Lama

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” Socrates

“In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.” Lao Tzu

“Life is available only in the present moment. If you abandon the present moment you cannot live the moments of your life deeply.” Thich Nhat Hanh

“We should never be absolutely certain of our knowledge. We need to be ready to give it up at a moment’s  notice for a higher truth. This called non-attachment to views, and it is one of the most important elements of our practice. Any view, no matter how noble or beautiful, even our belief in Buddhism, can be a trap.” Thich Nhat Han

“Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.” Ghandi

“Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” TS Eliot

“Without great solitude no serious work is possible.” Pablo Picasso

“It is the ability to choose which makes us human.” Madeline L’Engle

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver

“Weniger aber besser. Less but better." Dieter Rams

"But reality cannot be grasped by our discursive mind- the mind of imagination, discrimination, and discussion. We have to learn how to touch reality without our usual patterns of thinking." -Thich Nhat Hahn

“A man needs a little madness, or he never dares cut the rope and be free. “ Anothony Quinn in Zorba the Greek 

“A  man is the sum of his acts. “ John-Paul Sartre

"Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face. “ Mike Tyson

"Compassion is a verb.” Thich Nhat Han

“Every language is an old growth forest of the mind.” Wade Davis

“The loving speech of remonstrance has the power to influence even the imperial mind.” Dōgen

“Equanimity is not something that happens to you, it’s about how you practice and live your life.” John Daido Loori

"Most human beings spend 50 to 90 percent or more of their time in their imagination, living in fantasy." Charlotte Joko Beck

“If you can simply concentrate your minds inner light and behold its outer illumination, you’ll dispel the three poisons and drive away the six thieves once and for all. And without effort you’ll gain possession of an infinite number of virtues, perfections, and doors to the truth. Seeing through the mundane is less than an eye-blink away. Realization is now. Why worry about gray hair? But the door is hidden and can’t be revealed. I have only touched on beholding the mind.” Bodhidharma trans. Red Pine The Zen Teachings of Bodhidharma.

"Reality has no high or low." Bodhidharma

“The man of wide international experience, much learning and leisure-luxurious product of our long and sophisticated history- may with good reason wish to live simply, with few tools and minimal clothes, close to nature.” Gary Snyder

“Zen aims at freedom but its practice is disciplined.” Gary Snyder

“And now there are too many human beings. Let’s be animals or buddhas instead.” Gary Snyder

“Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter. If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.” Wu-Men

“I don’t know anything about consciousness. I just try to teach my students to hear the birds sing.” Shunryu Suzuki

“Renounce and enjoy.” Ghandi

“To live now now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all the bad around us, is a marvelous victory.” Howard Zinn

“I make myself rich by making my wants few.” Thoreau

“Our period is obsessed with the desire to forget,  and it is to fulfill that desire that it gives over to the demon of speed; it picks up the pace to show us that it no longer wishes to be remembered, that it is tired of itself, that it wants to blow out the tiny troubling flame of memory.” Milan Kundera

“Each time you let go of delusion and bring your mind back, you manifest the life of the Buddha.” John Daido Loori

“Ordinary mind is the way.” Nanquan

“When your life comes to an end, you will be like a crab falling into a pot of boiling water, with eight arms and legs going. Don’t say then that I didn’t warn you.”  Wu-Men

“In order to reach our full human potential, you must live completely and die completely.” John Daido Loori

“Smile, breathe and go slowly.” Thich Naht Hanh

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Leonardo da Vinci

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot more courage – to move in the opposite direction.”  EF Schumacher

“Though my view is as vast as the sky,  my practice is this fine as the dust of barley flour.” Narganjuna

“My life is my statement.”  Gandhi

“Poverty is involuntary and degrading. Where is simplicity is voluntary and enabling.”  Duane Elgin

“With conscious and direct involvement comes clarity. With clarity comes insight. With insight comes love. With love comes mutually helpful living. With mutual hopeful living a flourishing world civilization is made possible.” Duane Elgin in Voluntary Simplicity

“But now that I have created a wonderfully simple life, I plan not to lose it to the Internet.”  Elizabeth St. James

“One of the things that simplifying your life will do is free up time to figure out what really matters to you, and then enable you to arrange your time so you can do it.”  Elizabeth St. James

“We’re continually overwhelmed and distracted by our stuff. " Elizabeth St. James

“We get no letters from the world of emptiness, but when you see the plant flower, where you hear the sound of bamboo hit by the small stone, that is a letter from the world of emptiness.” Shunryu Suzuki

“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listened to it we find it fascinating.” John Cage

“Walking takes longer than any other form of locomotion except crawling. Thus, it stretches time and prolongs life. Walking makes the world much bigger, and therefore more interesting. You have time to observe the details.” Edward Abbey

“Information wants to be free.” -Stewart Brand

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” Richard Feynman

“Complicate to profit.  Minimize to grow.” Tim Ferris

“If you realize original nature, your natural mind, you know that fundamentally birth and death are without form. This is your true longevity. You see nothing to call misfortune. This is your security. You leave behind the notions of poverty and wealth and this is your true gain. You see that there is no one to despise as an enemy and this is your true conquest. You understand that there is no disparity between love and hate. This is true love and respect.”  Musō Soseki.

“The best way to get a good idea is to get lots of ideas.” Linus Pauling

“When you leave the way to the way, you attain the way. At the time of attaining the way, the way is always left to the way.” Dōgen

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could to learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Thoreau. Walden.

“Life is the full manifestation of total dynamic working.” Dainin Katagiri

“The government merely does the minimum necessary to prevent those few who are prone toward political action from organizing into politically effective groups. “ Robert E Gamer. The Developing Nations. 

“Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possession is a disease among them. These people have many made many rules that the rich break, but the poor may not. They have a religion in which the poor worship, but the rich will not! They ever take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their building and refuse.” Sitting Bull

“To learn the way of the Buddha is to learn about oneself. To learn about oneself is to forget oneself. To forget oneself is to experience the world as pure object. To experience the world as pure object is to let fall one’s own body and mind and the ‘self-other’ body and mind.” Dōgen

“I don’t really believe that we transmigrate between lives, but I know we definitely transmigrate within this life.” Shohaku Okumura 

“The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgement, character, and will.” William James

“Do not idle away the time needed for practice, but rather practice in the spirit of a person trying to extinguish a blaze in his hair.” Dōgen

“Cost and risk socialized, profit privatized.” Noam Chomsky

“Simple living. Higher thinking.” Buddhadasa Bikkhu

“The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive.” Steve jobs to Rupert Murdoch

“We have a cultural tendency towards denial, but, being affluent, we strangle ourselves with what we can buy. We only to look at the houses we build to see how we build against space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there.” Gretel Ehlrich

“It had occurred to me that comfort was only a disguise for discomfort; reference points, a disguise for what will change.” Gretel Ehlrich

“Be more simple.” Soen Roshi

“Generally speaking, if you still have not sufficiently clarified the Buddha Dharma, you ought not to preach the Dharma rashly and heedlessly to others.” Dōgen

“All worldly pursuits have but the one unavoidable end, which is sorrow; acquisitions end in dispersion; buildings, in destruction; meetings, in separation; births; in death. Knowing this, one should from the very first renounce acquisition and heaping up, and building and meeting, and…set about to realizing the Truth…Life is short, and the time of death uncertain; so apply yourselves to meditation…” Milarepa

“When there is no discrimination, how can there be distaste?” Dōgen

“When I am sad, the whole universe is sad; when I am glad, the whole universe is glad.” Yamada Roshi

“Just standing up. Just sitting down. Just laughing. Just weeping.” Yamada Roshi

“It is the lean, conscious exercise of one’s energies in the face of profoundly difficult odds that may bring forth insight.” Robert Aiken 

“What is necessary is not anger or impatience, but the understanding of the question of suffering, how it comes about, and how to get rid of it, and then to work accordingly with patience, intelligence, determination, and energy.” Walpula Rahula 

“We are distracted from distraction by distraction.” T.S. Elliot 

“Sit down and be quiet. You are drunk and this is the edge of the roof.” Rumi

“The affairs of the world are endless. They only end when we stop them.” Shantideva

"There is more to life than increasing its speed.” Ghandi

"To live in the realm of Buddha Nature means to die as a small being moment after moment.” Shunryu Suzuki. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

“To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.” Shunryu Suzuki. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

“Zazen practice is the direct expression of our true nature. Strictly speaking, for a human being, there is no other practice than this practice. There is no other way of life than this way of life.” Shunryu Suzuki. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

“When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can learn something. The beginner’s mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless.” Shunryu Suzuki. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

Why give up the sitting platform of your own house and wander uselessly in the dust of a remote land? Once a wrong step is taken, you depart from the way.” Dōgen. Recommending zazen for all people.

“The tiny snowflakes. They fall no place place but here- Is this the passing of fall or the appearance of winter?…tiny snowflakes. They fall no place but here. Do you understand?” Dōgen

“When we realize that we are everything, what can we possibly want? What is there to loose or gain?” John Daido Loori

“Ring the bells that can still ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Leonard Cohen

“I came to realize clearly that mind, my mind, is no other than rivers, mountains, and the great wide earth, the sun, the moon, and the stars.” Dōgen 

“When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that’s wisdom. When I look outside and see that I am everything, that’s love. Between these two my life turns. Nigaradatta. Advaita spiritual teacher

“If disease is and expression if individual life under unfavorable conditions, then epidemics must be indicative of mass disturbances of mass life.” Rudolf Virchow

“And the question is being who you are, whoever who are, without denying that that’s who you are, how can you do something useful for other people.” Noam Chomsky

“Zen is the wide, all encompassing gate of compassion.” Dōgen

"The practice is the path.” Dōgen

“Being attentive in the details of your daily life is also training in zen. When your life and zen are one you are truly living zen. Unless it accords with your everyday activities zen is merely embellishment.” Yasutani Roshi. Three Pillars of Zen.

“Mountain, rock, bamboo, tree, ripples in water, mist and cloulds- none of these things of nature has a fixed form. But, nonetheless, they all have a constant inner line. That is what must guide the painter.” Su Tung-Po. Song Dynasty Painter. 

“Burn the ships.” Cortez

“The idea of Wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders.” Edward Abbey

“Take the example of the Zen Masters. No matter what task or motion they undertake, they do it slowly and evenly, without reluctance.” Thich Naht Hanh. The Miracle of Mindfulness.  

“There’s only one rule I know of: goddam it, you’ve got to be kind.” Kurt Vonnegut

“We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.” Goethe

"The ancestor of every action is a thought. " Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door. It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.”  Henry David Thoreau, Walden

"But now, now that you're here the words of the Lorax seems perfectly clear. UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." The Once-ler speaking of the Lorax in Dr Seuss' The Lorax