Dogen Zenji Quotes

What is this world? A mere curl of smoke for the wind to scatter.

Everything is transient. Everything is constantly changing. The only thing we have is now.

The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows whither.

Everything vanishes, falls apart, doesn't it? Nature is always the same but nothing in her that appears to us lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence, along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes. It must give us a taste of her Eternity.

We are but phantoms ... and the phantoms of phantoms, desires like cloud-shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train carries the shadow of its lights.

Everything that comes together falls apart.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf

Everything is in constant flux on this earth. Nothing keeps the same unchanging shape, and our affections, being attached to things outside us, necessarily change and pass away as they do. Always out ahead of us or lagging behind, they recall a past which is gone or anticipate a future which may never come into being; there is nothing solid there for the heart to attach itself to. Thus our earthly joys are almost without exception the creatures of a moment.

Even the most solid of things, and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light.

Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.

While we flatter ourselves that things remain the same, they are changing under our very eyes from year to year, from day to day.

Everything transitory is but an image.

The world is changing every moment, and is therefore unreal. It has non permanent existence.

Reflect frequently upon the instability of things, and how very fast the scenes of nature are shifted. Matter is in perpetual flux. Change is always and everywhere at work; it strikes through causes and effects, and leaves nothing fixed and permanent.

Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.

I see that all of us who live are nothing but images or insubstantial shadow.

Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.

Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don't know how.

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

This world's a bubble.

Death is an absolute mystery. We are all vulnerable to it, it's what makes life interesting and suspenseful.

Everything changes. The more I try to hold on to the moment, the more it slips through my fingers.

Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world: As star at dawn, a bubble in a stream A flash of lightning in a summer cloud A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream

Fame is an illusion. Things can be given to you quite easily, but they get ripped away so quickly as well.