Dogen Zenji Quotes

The knowledge of self is the most important thing, because how are you going to know God if you don't know yourself? How are you going to know anything if you don't know yourself?

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.

Know thyself, for through thyself only thou canst know God.

We have so committed ourselves in different ways that we have hardly any time for self-reflection, to observe, to study.

The only journey is the one within.

We can't see ourselves very clearly. This I learned as a songwriter. I'm forever trying to figure out what my own truth is.

To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.

To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to forget ourselves.

The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable advertisement of all others, but the least practised, is to study and learn how to know ourselves. This is the foundation of wisdom and the highway to whatever is good. . . . God, Nature, the wise, the world, preach man, exhort him both by word and deed to the study of himself.

Think... of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own - only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it.

One's own self is well hidden from one's own self; of all mines of treasure, one's own is the last to be dug up.

The real preparation for education is the study of one's self.

Everything is a subject; the subject is yourself. It is within yourself that you must look and not around you... The greatest happiness is to reveal it to others, to study oneself, to paint oneself continually in [one's] work.

Yes, know thyself: in great concerns or small, be this thy care, for this, my friend, is all.

There's no journey worth taking except the journey through one's self. That's the most important journey you take. I found that out as I went around the world many times: I was learning about me.

Learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate your self. Body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will be manifest.

A man may perform astonishing feats and comprehend a vast amount of knowledge, and yet have no understanding of himself. But suffering directs a man to look within. If it succeeds, then there, within him, is the beginning of his learning.

I've been living with myself all of my life, so I know all of me. So when I watch me, all I see is me. It's boring.

My personality doesn't interest me.

To travel is to take a journey into yourself.

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.

The ultimate mystery is one's own self.

Study what thou art Whereof thou art a part What thou knowest of this art This is really what thou art. All that is without thee also is within.

Walk slowly; all you can ever come to is yourself.

Every one rushes elsewhere and into the future, because no one wants to face one's own inner self.