You’re only making a mess by trying to put things straight. You’re trying to straighten out a wiggly world and no wonder you’re in trouble.

Given a universe in which anything goes, what are the most lovely, generous, and exuberant things we can do?.

But this isn’t the case, because there’s a lot more to the mind than thinking. There is this direct apprehension of the world, unmediated through concepts or thoughts.

Most people imagine that if they stop thinking, that’s sort of the end: the life of the mind instantly curls up and dies.

Go to your interstellar space situation, where it does not matter whether you live or die, and realize that state. Having realized that state, you can come back to the other states and live them with more verve.

I am, if anything, an entertainer, I love to feel that certain spark leap the gap between the speaker and the audience. But I don't have any message of world-changing nature. The world might change, but not because you're trying to change it.

We are trying to translate things into a form of life very much simpler and cruder than the form of life that we are talking about. A triangle is very much simpler and cruder than a mountain, even though you may represent a mountain with a triangle.

Things become complicated only when we think about them.

And it is these fights which (more than anything else at the moment, you see) are endangering the entire human project—but all based fundamentally on the illusion that it’s utterly important that we survive.

In proportion, as we are frightfully concerned to survive, we start fighting other people. We start clobbering our neighbors who are stealing our crops and whatever it is. All the old fights start.

And the difficulty is that, as we become disturbed and anxious about this, it’s more difficult to keep the game going.

Because we are captivated by the illusion of the necessity and the importance of going on, to keep other people going on, to keep children going on, to keep this thing up.

But when you have this terrifying urgency to go on—and feel you must, this is important, this matters—we screen out of our consciousness the fact that this is our own volition and our own game.

That’s the basis of our distinction between work and play. Play is: everybody needs some time to goof off. But they must go back to work, because you’ve got to farm and fish and manufacture and produce, so that you can go on.

In a way, every being in this world is torn between going on and goofing off.

We love to see a child lost in the dance and not performing for an audience. To be happy and know that you are happy is really the overflowing cup of life. To dance as if there was no audience.

Zen is above all the liberation of the mind from conventional thought, and this is something utterly different from rebellion against convention, on the one hand, or adapting foreign conventions, on the other.

The course of wisdom—what is really sensible—is to let go, is to commit oneself, to give oneself up. And that’s quite mad. So we come to the strange conclusion that in madness lies sanity.

Relaxation is something just as elusive as happiness; it is something which no amount of self-assertive striving can obtain, for as it is in a certain sense the absence of effort, any effort to achieve it is self-defeating.

A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions.

But in Palestine, where they had this monarchical conception of god, he was regarded as a subversive revolutionary and had to be crucified.