Selected practice quotes

1. All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness ... the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives.

2. Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.

3. This new form of activity medicine I could not represent to myself as talking about the religion of love, but only as an actual putting it into practice.

4. In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.

5. It is easy to love one's enemy when one is making fine speeches; but so difficult to do so in the actual everyday work of life.

6. It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good. But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do.

7. We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.

8. Give up thinking as though not giving it up. Observe techniques as though not observing.

9. I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

10. I refer to my hands, feet and body as the tools of the trade. The hands and feet must be sharpened and improved daily to be efficient.

11. Knowing is not enough, you must apply; willing is not enough, you must do.

12. Practice all movements slow and fast, soft and hard; the effectiveness of Jeet Kune-Do depends on split-second timing and reflexive action, which can be achieved only through repetitious practice.

13. In their religion they are so uneven, That each man goes his own byway to heaven.

14. There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

15. Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.

16. Whatever you would make habitual, practice it; and if you would not make a thing habitual, do not practice it, but accustom yourself to something else.

17. Let thy speech of God be renewed day by day, aye, rather than thy meat and drink.

18. One more thing: don't spend too much time merely reading. The best part of this work is the play, so play and enjoy!

19. Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

20. Religion? Yes, I know it well; I've heard its prayers and creeds, And seen men put them all to shame with poor, half-hearted deeds. They follow Christ, but far away; they wander and they doubt. I'll serve him in a better way, and live his precepts out.

21. Ideas get substance and value not by being discussed but by being lived.

22. If I don't practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.

23. Relax. Be yourself. Play a lot.

24. Basic anatomy. That has got to be the ongoing frustration: Why can't my fingers do what I want them to do? Not being able to play what I hear in my head - that is the ultimate source of frustration.

25. When you hear something you don't like, don't ever play it again.

26. To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.

27. A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.

28. You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.

29. When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?

30. To love God in the most practical way is to love our fellow beings. If we feel for others in the same way as we feel for our own dear ones, we love God.

31. There is timing in everything. Timing in strategy cannot be mastered without a great deal of practice.

32. In deep meditation the flow of concentration is continuous like the flow of oil.

33. All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.

34. I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.

35. To do something right it must be done twice. The first time instructs the second.

36. [If] you don't have any soul and you don't have any talent, jazz is what you should do. ... any fool can do it; all you gotta do is practice.

37. Let us worship the spirit in spirit, standing on spirit. Let the foundation be spirit, the middle spirit, the culmination spirit.

38. Pray all the time, read all the scriptures in the world, and worship all the gods there are ...but unless you realize the Truth, there is no freedom.

39. We must be bright and cheerful. Long faces do not make religion. Religion should be the most joyful thing in the world, because it is the best.

40. Work and worship are necessary to take away the veil, to lift off the bondage and illusion.

41. One has to reach to the absolute state of awareness: that is Zen. You cannot do it every morning for a few minutes or for half an hour and then forget all about it. It has to become like your heartbeat. You have to sit in it, you have to walk in it. Yes, you have even to sleep in it.

42. For a long time I limited myself to one colour - as a form of discipline.

43. There is one art, no more, no less: to do all things with art- lessness.

44. Practice is the best of all instructors.

45. It takes a long time to bring excellence to maturity.

46. There are, strictly speaking, no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity.

47. Zazen practice is the direct expression of our true nature. Strictly speaking, for a human being, there is no other practice than this practice; there is no other way of life than this way of life.

48. After you have practiced for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little. If your mind has ideas of progress, you may say, 'Oh, this pace is terrible!' But actually it is not. When you get wet in a fog it is very difficult to dry yourself. So there is no need to worry about progress.

49. If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

50. It's not true that you should first think up an idea for a better world and only then 'put it into practice,' but, rather, through the fact of your existence in the world, you create the idea or manifest it - create it, as it were, from the 'material of the world,' articulate it in the 'language of the world.'

51. Every development of truths which relate to human nature, and more especially its active manifestations, is attended with a wish to see worked out in practice what theory has shown us to be just and good. To man, whose mind is seldom satisfied with the calmly beneficent influence of abstract ideas, this desire is perfectly natural, and it increases in liveliness with the spirit of benevolent sympathy in social happiness and well-being. But, however natural in itself, and however noble in its origin, this desire has not unfrequently led to hurtful consequences,-nay, often to greater evils than the colder indifference, or (as from the very opposite cause the same effect may follow) the glowing enthusiasm, which, comparatively heedless of reality, delights only in the pure beauty of ideas.

52. It is the principle of necessity towards which, as to their ultimate centre, all the ideas advanced in this essay immediately converge. In abstract theory the limits of this necessity are determined solely by considerations of man's proper nature as a human being; but in the application we have to regard, in addition, the individuality of man as he actually exists. This principle of necessity should, I think, prescribe the grand fundamental rule to which every effort to act on human beings and their manifold relations should be invariably conformed. For it is the only thing which conducts to certain and unquestionable results. The consideration of the useful, which might be opposed to it, does not admit of any true and unswerving decision.

53. To study the phenomenon of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.

54. The most necessary, most difficult and principal thing in music, that is time.

55. Some people believe it is hard to lead the heaven-bound life that is called 'spiritual' because they have heard that we need to renounce the world and give up the desires attributed to the body and the flesh and 'live spiritually.' All they understand by this is spurning worldly interests, especially concerns for money and prestige, going around in constant devout meditation about God, salvation, and eternal life, devoting their lives to prayer, and reading the Word and religious literature. They think this is renouncing the world and living for the spirit and not for the flesh. However, the actual case is quite different, as I have learned from an abundance of experience and conversation with angels. In fact, people who renounce the world and live for the spirit in this fashion take on a mournful life for themselves, a life that is not open to heavenly joy, since our life does remain with us [after death]. No, if we would accept heaven's life, we need by all means to live in the world and to participate in its duties and affairs. In this way, we accept a spiritual life by means of our moral and civic life; and there is no other way a spiritual life can be formed within us, no other way our spirits can be prepared for heaven. This is because living an inner life and not an outer life at the same time is like living in a house that has no foundation, that gradually either settles or develops gaping cracks or totters until it collapses.

56. ... any mundane activity can become meditative. Digging a hole in the garden, planting new roses in the garden - you can do it with such tremendous love and compassion, you can do it with the hands of a buddha. There is no contradiction ... I say unto you, your every act should be a ceremony. If you can bring your consciousness, your awareness, your intelligence to the act, if you can be spontaneous, then there is no need for any other religion: life itself will be the religion.