Joshua Waitzkin Quotes

The Tao of the sage is work without effort.

To practice Aikido fully you must calm the spirit and go back to the origin.

The Way is basically perfect. It doesn't require perfecting.

If you take anything I say with any seriousness whatsoever, go study Yang style tai chi. It will make you live longer.

But the basic Taoism that we are concerned with here is simply a particular way of appreciating, learning from, and working with whatever happens in everyday life.

People think that I work out but it's all t'ai chi.

You need at least six or seven years to understand the philosophy and concentration of karate to know to clean your spirit of everything and dedicate your mind and body to the sport.

I've been doing Tai Chi on and off for 20 years. The fundamentals of all martial arts are the same.

The aim of tai chi is not to strike first to gain dominance over an opponent, but to wait and hit at the right moment.

I enjoy watching the karate practitioners because of their high spiritual level.

I have dabbled in martial arts all my life, since I was 7, maybe - tae kwon do, capoeira, Muay Thai. It's always been an interest because in martial arts there is a mind/body relationship.

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

I actually did a lot of yoga because I found it helped with my core strength and flexibility, which are two things you absolutely need when you're doing martial arts.

A lot of my friends have told me to read 'Tao Te Ching' - a classic Chinese text on the fundamentals of Taoism.

Heaven does nothing: its non-doing is its serenity. Earth does nothing: its non-doing is its rest. From the union of these two non-doings All actions proceed. All things are made. How vast, how invisible This coming-to-be! All things come from nowhere! How vast, how invisible No way to explain it! All beings in their perfection Are born of non-doing. Hence it is said: Heaven and earth do nothing Yet there is nothing they do not do. Where is the man who can attain To this non-doing?

Yielding is the way of the Tao.

This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve, although there are levels and levels of this too, as attested by the ability of Hindu mystics to live buried alive for many days. Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest.

Only the intelligent knows how to identify all things as one. . . . When one is at ease with himself, one is near Tao. This is to let Nature take its own course.

Your tree pose is going crazy and you're falling; and your leg is burning; and it feels impossible to maintain any sort of stability practice observing what's happening instead of getting wrapped up in the circumstance. If you can learn to be easy with your breath in these moments, your body and mind will follow.

When we practice paying attention, whether in meditation, yoga (moving mediation), or simply walking down the street, we can choose to be at ease, or choose to be tense. It's a choice, and that choice is up to no one but us to decide.

Act non-action; undertake no undertaking; taste the tasteless.

If you persist in trying to attain what is never attained (It is Tao's gift), if you persist in making effort to obtain what effort cannot get, if you persist in reasoning about what cannot be understood, you will be destroyed by the very thing you seek. To know when to stop, to know when you can get no further by your own action, this is the right beginning!

He is beginning to master wisdom when he tries to learn how not to try.

A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.

I will be fond of keeping still, and the people will of themselves become correct.