Dogen Zenji Quotes

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.

In my own life, as winters turn into spring, I find it not only hard to cope with mud but also hard to credit the small harbingers of larger life to come, hard to hope until the outcome is secure. Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility; for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger's act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable again.

Your emptiness is but the preparation for your being filled, and your casting down is but the making ready for your lifting up.

Our destiny often looks like a fruit-tree in winter. Who would think from its pitiable aspect that those rigid boughs, those rough twigs could next spring again be green, bloom, and even bear fruit? Yet we hope it, we know it.

No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.

Quite the opposite. I might fall on my face, but I feel born again.

When things are bad, it's the best time to reinvent yourself.

The lotus comes from the murkiest water but grows into the purest thing.

Today is a new day for the land.

Life is full and overflowing with the new. But it is necessary to empty out the old to make room for the new to enter.

That is one good thing about this world... there are always sure to be more springs.

Too late for fruit, too soon for flowers.

Is it sin, which makes the worm a chrysalis, and the chrysalis a butterfly, and the butterfly dust?

9/11 occurs, and you're going to rebuild, and after awhile, the memory will be there, but there will be something new there, and different, and functioning, and electric.

I always figure I have this tree and there's always some green fruit that's not ready to pick or blossoms that are ready to flower; there are always some ready to drop off too.

I guess I'm in a state of becoming. Even though I've had a full career and I've been around a long time, it's like dinosaurs are coming back. It's all new. I'm having to be on my own and seeing how exciting life can be now.

Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.

Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.

You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.

I believe we are most beautiful when we are constantly shedding our old selves and moving into new light.

The past is lying in flames. The future will rise from the flames within our hearts.

Crises test us. We either fall apart or we grow up fast. Finding new reserves of strength and capacity that we never knew we had. The shocking events that fill us with dread today can transform us, and they can transform the world for the better. But first we need to picture the world that we're fighting for. And we have to dream it up together. Right now, every alarm in our house is going off simultaneously. It's time to listen. It's time to leap.

Things are constantly in flux and changing, and as crazy-making as that can be, it's also the thing that can get you through tough times - 'Well, things change.'