Lao Tzu Quotes

Being human means there's a wall-builder in each of us. Our minds naturally divide the world into me and not-me, us and them. For thousands of years, our sages have taught that we're all one, yet we still divide wherever we look.

Good is that which makes for unity. Evil is that which makes for separateness.

Can you dissolve your ego? Can you abandon the idea of self and other? Can you relinquish the notions of male and female, short and long, life and death? Can you let go of all these dualities and embrace the Tao without skepticism or panic? If so, you can reach the heart of the Integral Oneness.

The Tao gives birth to One. One gives birth to Two. Two gives birth to Three. Three gives birth to all things. All things have their backs to the female and stand facing the male. When male and female combine, all things achieve harmony. Ordinary men hate solitude. But the Master makes use of it, embracing his aloneness, realizing he is one with the whole universe.

That's just your ego, trying to make sure it stays in charge. This is what ego does. It keeps you feeling separate, keeps you with a sense of duality, tries to convince you that you're flawed and broken and alone instead of whole.

We're all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.

Every explicit duality is an implicit unity.

In love, for example - the so-called love - we are 'related.' We appear to be related. We create the fallacy of a relationship, but in fact we are just deceiving ourselves. The two will remain two. Howsoever near, the two will remain two. Even in sexual communion they will be two. This two-ness, this duality will never last. So a relationship is only creating a fallacious oneness. It is not there. Oneness can never exist between two selves. Oneness can only exist between two no-selves.

The feeling we experience while we look at a picture is not to be distinguished from the picture or from ourselves. the feeling, picture, and ourselves are united in one mystery.

To split yourself in two is just the most radical thing you can do

Tao is the source of both fullness and emptiness. But it is itself neither fullness nor emptiness.

Unity is plural and, at a minimum, is two.

The ego of man and woman is the soul. If the soul is independent, how then can it be isolated from the infinite whole?

Oh, grant me my prayer, that I may never lose the touch of the one in the play of the many.

We are not the same. But we are, somehow, one.

The purpose of theatre is... making an event in which a group of fragments are sudde nly brought together... in a community which, by the natural laws that make every community, gradually breaks up... At certain moments this fragmented world comes together and for a certain time it can rediscover the marvel of organic life ... The marvel of being one.

When you sit in the full lotus position, your left foot is on your right thigh and your right foot is on your left thigh. When we cross our legs like this, even though we have a right leg and a left leg, they become one. The position expresses the oneness of duality: not two and not one. This is the most important teaching: not two, and not one. Our body and mind are not two and not one. If you think your body and mind are two, that is wrong; if you think that they are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one.

So we grew together like to a double cherry, seeming parted, but yet an union in partition, two lovely berries molded on one stem.

If you would behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life. For life and death are one, even as the river and sea are one.

Mind cannot think without duality. Duality is the way of thinking. In silence, all dualities disappear.

Taoist philosophy is essentially monistic. Matter and energy, Yang and Yin, heaven and earth, are conceived of as essentially one or as two coexistent poles of one indivisible whole.

We are the children equally of the Sky and the Earth.

When affirmation and negation came into being, Tao faded. After Tao faded, then came one-sided attachments.

The sun and its light, the ocean and the wave, the singer and his song — not one. Not two.