Howard Fast Quotes

There are things that I value now that I didn't when I first went over there, like Zen Buddhism, which has become part of my life over the last couple years.

Meditation is the golden key to all the mysteries of life.

Meditation is silence, energising and fulfilling. Silent is the eloquent expression of the inexpressible.

Meditation or religion is a totally different world: it is relaxation, it is let-go - it is not concentration at all. It is not one-pointedness, it is no-pointedness.

If you want to study Zen, you should forget all your previous ideas and just practice zazen and see what kind of experience you have in your practice. That is naturalness.

True piety lies rather in the power to contemplate the universe with a quiet mind.

To find a Buddha all you have to do is see your nature.

Zen Buddhism is a discipline where belief isn't necessary.

I've been practising Buddhism for forty years, and that's what has led me to this path of discovering my own humanity and recognizing the humanity in others.

I've been practicing modalities of Eastern philosophy since about 1972. What I've learned through my meditation is a sense of equanimity, a sense of all things being equal.

I was inspired to spend an entire year - my 65th year - reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu's messages, practicing them and ultimately writing down these insights as I felt Lao-tzu wanted us to know them.

My feeling or philosophy is closer to Taoism and Zen Buddhism, 'cause it's the most practical.

Wisdom happens through meditation, and bliss also happens through meditation. Both the flowers bloom on the same branch.

Through the portals of silence the healing sun of wisdom and peace will shine upon you.

When your consciousness has become ripe in true zazen-pure like clear water, like a serene mountain lake, not moved by any wind-then anything may serve as a medium for realization.

If you want to travel the Way of Buddhas and Zen masters, then expect nothing, seek nothing, and grasp nothing.

Be calm. Be Zen. You are Buddha.

My whole teaching consists of two words, meditation and love. Meditate so that you can feel immense silence, and love so that your life can become a song, a dance, a celebration. You will have to move between the two, and if you can move easily, if you can move without any effort, you have learned the greatest thing in life.

I meditate twice a day. I chant. I lean more towards Buddhist practices.

Meditation is one of the greatest arts in life - perhaps the greatest, and one cannot possibly learn it from anybody, that is the beauty of it.

Zen is everywhere.... But for you, Zen is right here.

Inner silence works from the moment you begin to accrue it. What the old sorcerers were after was the final dramatic, end result of reaching that individual threshold of silence.

Meditation is the most significant because it opens the door for all other significant things: love, prayer, God, light, music, poetry.

The whole art of meditation is, how to leave the personality easily, move to the center, and be not a person. Just to be and not be a person is the whole art of meditation, the whole art of inner ecstasy.

The witness is always in the here and now and it lives in each instant of living. To be in the witness is to listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without clinging, without opinions.