Our custom has almost always been to look outside ourselves for ethical standards instead of feeling free to base our principles simply upon what we would like to do and have done to us.

If there is anything to learn from history, it is that scoldings, warnings, and preachings are a complete ethical failure [and] only confirm and ingrain the attitudes which keep us at war.

the erotic is deeper than the genital. Beyond the play of the penis in the vagina lies the play of the organism in its environment—the polymorphous eroticism of man's original body

all art is propaganda... the artist is not a harmless eccentric but one who—under the guise of irrelevance—creates and reveals a new reality [while] in the value system of civilization, of compulsive survival, the artist is irrelevant.

to say 'must' to rhythm is to stop it dead... All perfect accomplishment in art or life is accompanied by the curious sensation that it is happening of itself—not forced, studied, or contrived

Music and pure mathematics are closer to life than are languages which point to meanings beyond themselves. Ordinary language refers to life, but music is living.

The extremity of the situation itself,[ the suffering] generates compassion because the most intense darkness is itself the seed of light, and all explicit warfare is implicit love.

Buddhism and Taoism—unlike Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism—are not whole cultures but critiques of culture: endearing, non-violent revolutions or 'loyal oppositions' to the cultures they live in.

The point is not that the problem has no solution, but that it is so meaningless that it need not be felt as a problem.

Social conditioning depends entirely on persuading people not to accept themselves.

The normal state of consciousness in our culture is both the context and the breeding ground of mental disease.

ego is the role, the 'act' [and when] it is understood that the ego is a social fiction, life ceases to be problematic

Pain and death expose the pretense that one's inmost self is permanent, that it is in control. Hence the obscure but powerful feeling that one ought not to suffer or die.

Society persuades the individual to do what it wants by making it appear that its commands are the individual's inmost self... I am actually being controlled by other people's words and gestures masquerading as my inner or better self.

the medicine of the discipline becomes a diet, the cure an addiction, and the raft a houseboat... liberation turns into just another social institution and dies of respectability

If science is to become our way of liberation, its theoretical view must be translated into feeling... Western science must have its own yoga, and some outgrowth of psychotherapy is the natural candidate

The ego is in every sense a story… To identify with the ego is to confuse the organism with its history, to make its guiding principle a narrowly selected and incomplete record… and therefore liberation from the ego is synonymous with the full acceptance of death.

As the Chinese Taoists have seen, there is really no alternative to trusting man's nature. It is the most practical of practical politics.

LIfe is not a problem so why are you asking for a solution? The real problem is believing that the question makes sense.

There is no knowledge except knowledge of the present, there is no observer separate from the flow of events and as a result, the sense of self shifts from an independent observer to everything that is observed.