W. S. Merwin Quotes

Not creating delusions is enlightenment.

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

The doors of wisdom are never shut.

Knowledge is love and light and vision.

I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.

Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.

To see nothing is to perceive the Way, and to understand nothing is to know the Dharma, because seeing is neither seeing nor not seeing and because understanding is neither understanding nor not understanding.

Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.

I see, I know, I believe, I am undeceived.

There is no darkness but ignorance.

It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.

Wisdom begins at the end.

Ignorance is not bliss - it is oblivion.

Ignorance is not bliss. It is oblivion.

Being enlightened is just being aware. It's just being aware of something that you weren't aware before.

I've always thought that when they say ignorance is bliss, the converse to that is that knowledge is hell. The more you know, the bleaker things can get.

Everything has to do with meditation. It's a conversation; it's a joy - it's everything.

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand.

Insight is not a matter of memory, of knowledge and time, which are all thought.

Ignorance is not bliss. Bliss is knowing the full meaning of what you have been given.

Knowledge is the barrier to knowing. When knowledge is dropped, knowing flowers.

When you are in deep meditation, you feel a great serenity, a joy that is unknown to you, a watchfulness that is a new guest. Soon this watchfulness will become the host. The day the watchfulness becomes the host, it remains twenty-four hours with you. And out of this watchfulness, whatever you do has a wisdom in it. Whatever you do shows a clarity, a purity, a spontaneity, a grace.

Now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened.

No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.

What you know, you know, what you don't know, you don't know. This is true wisdom.