Shunryu Suzuki Quotes

The moment you believe your own crap and excuses, you fail.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

I did it to myself. It wasn't society... it wasn't a pusher, it wasn't being blind or being black or being poor. It was all my doing.

The truth is, I've never fooled anyone. I've let men sometimes fool themselves.

I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.

The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.

We should not be upset that others hide the truth from us, when we hide it so often from ourselves

I love playing women, and I think that this is a throughline to a lot of the characters I've played - they all have this aspect of being wronged. And I think, a lot of the time, the characters are actually wronged by themselves, and they find someone else to blame it on.

No sickness worse than imagining thyself to be perfect can afflict thy soul.

In the commission of evil, fear no man so much as thyself; another is but one witness against thee, thou art a thousand; another thou mayest avoid, thyself thou canst not. Wickedness is its own punishment.

The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat one's self.

Those who think that they have arrived, have lost their way. Those who think they have reached their goal, have missed it. Those who think they are saints, are demons.

In Leon's account of his life, no-one was mean-spirited, no-one schemed or lied or betrayed; everyone was celebrated at least in some degree... Leon turned out to be a spineless, grinning idiot.

Don't be fooled by your own wisdom

When you blame and criticize others, you are avoiding some truth about yourself.

In the end you will be your own undoing. You can't escape you.

If those persons, who fancy themselves gifted with both the power and the right to define and punish other men's vices, would but turn their thoughts inwardly, they would probably find that they have a great work to do at home; and that, when that shall have been completed, they will be little disposed to do more towards correcting the vices of others, than simply to give to others the results of their experience and observation.

You learn in life that the only person you can really correct and change is yourself.

Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?

Most people would rather change their circumstances to improve their lives when instead they need to change themselves to improve their circumstances. They put in just enough effort to distance themselves from their problems without ever trying to go after the root, which can often be found in themselves. Because they don't try to change the source of their problems, their problems keep coming back at them.

Only fools think they're wise; the rest of us just muddle through as we can.

Humans don't really improve on our own functioning, we only interfere with it, distort it, and disguise it.

The longer I live, the more I realize that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time!

Only a fool is interested in other people's guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart.

One must know oneself as one is, not as one wishes to be, which is merely an ideal and therefore fictitious, unreal; it is only that which is that can be transformed, not that which you wish to be.