Without leaving home
You can understand all that goes on in the world.
Without looking through a window,
You can see the universal patterns.
The farther you go,
The less you know.
The wise therefore
Don’t go but know,
Don’t look but see,
Don’t try but succeed.
The best way to do is to be.
“When some one reminded him that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, he said, 'And I sentenced them to stay at home.'”
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“The wise take Heaven as their ancestor, virtue as their home, and the Tao as their door and escape change.”
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“‘Without traveling’ means to know without depending on previous or external experience… ‘without trying’ means to focus the spirit on the tranquility that excels at making things happen.”
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“How long will you keep pounding on an open door begging for someone to open it?”
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“One is on the way for aeons without leaving his house; one leaves his house without being on the way.”
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“The reason sages of the past understood everything without going anywhere was simply because they kept their natures whole.”
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“For the wise, knowledge is not limited to form… Name is not limited to matter… Success is not limited to action… they don’t have to do anything.”
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“There is no need to look for God here or there. He is no farther away than the door of your own heart.”
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“We have the knowledge not to search for divinity removed from us if we have it near; it is within us more than we ourselves are.”
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“Much that would be something has become nothing by being left alone, and what was nothing has become of consequence by being made much of… Often the remedy causes the disease. It is by no means the least of life’s rules to let things alone.”
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“Whether drifting through life on a boat or climbing toward old age leading a horse, each day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
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“Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet.”
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“Searching through the paths and levels for a place far away, they have never had a chance to arrive at buddhahood.”
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“how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be his world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”
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“The quest for enlightenment only makes sense because buddha-nature is already present.”
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“if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams… In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.”
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“Good judgment is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgment.”
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“Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.”
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“I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.”
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“The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.”
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“I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.”
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“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
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“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.”
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“The only journey is the ‘Let life happen to you.’ Believe me: life is in the right, always. Journey within.”
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“Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.”
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“Some people look for a beautiful place, others make a place beautiful.”
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“Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels.”
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“No matter what the situation, you cannot neglect Buddha, because you yourself are Buddha… Usually when someone believes in a particular religion, his attitude becomes more and more a sharp angle pointing away from himself… in our way the point of the sharp angle is always towards ourselves.”
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“There is no place to go. The whole foundation is already here in each one of us.”
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“We tend to expect great things from ‘seeing the world’ and ‘getting experience.’…Lao Tzu’s point: it’s the inner eye that really sees the world.”
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“Some people are old at 18 and some are young at 90. Time is a concept that humans created.”
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“There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.”
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“When we look at things as they are on a very simple and ordinary level, we find that they are fantastically , obviously true, frighteningly true… There is a kind of courtship, a love affair between the obviousness and you perceiving it.”
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“Wisdom is connected with looking, and knowledge is connected with seeing.”
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“… in this house that Carl Jung built, piling up stones with his own hands, at the very entrance, he found the need to chisel out these words… Sometimes I close my eyes and repeat them over and over, and they make me strangely calm. ‘Cold or Not, God Is Present.’”
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“I think that I was quite a grown-up child, and I have been a pretty childish adult.”
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“Such a cozy room, the windows are illuminated… Our house is a very, very, very fine house with two cats in the yard; Life used to be so hard; Now everything is easy 'cause of you.”
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Comments (1)
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Shan Dao
7 years ago
Instead of Shakespeare’s “Much ado about nothing,” (from Aesop, “Don't make much ado about nothing” ) Lao Tzu suggests, “No ado about everything.”
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