You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.

When you know that this moment is the Tao, and this moment is considered by itself without past and without future—eternal, neither coming into being nor going out of being — there is nirvana.

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick.

You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.

“Kindly let me help you or you will drown,” said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree.

It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd—uncanny and highly improbable.

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it.

To put is still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath.

As Aristotle says, the beginning of philosophy is wonder. Philosophy is man’s expression of curiosity about everything.

on anxiety:

What looks like chaos at one level is harmony at another.

My wish would be to tell, not how things ought to be, but how they are, and how and why we ignore them as they are.

Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.