“‘official psychotherapy’ lacks integrity and becomes the obedient tool of armies, bureaucracies, churches, corporations, and all agencies that require individual brainwashing… the therapist who is really interested in helping the individual is forced into social criticism.”

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“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.”

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

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“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.”

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

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“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”

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“If there is anything to be learned from history, it is that scoldings, warnings, and preachings are a complete ethical failure... they only confirm and ingrain the attitudes which keep us at war.”

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“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.”

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

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“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.”

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“one is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“Psychotherapy and liberation are completed in the moment when shame and guilt collapse, when the organism is no longer compelled to defend itself for being an oganism.”

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“Respect ethical tradition not because is is sacrosanct but because it is the only way of being in communication with others.”

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

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“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.”

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“symptoms... say, anxiety, migraine, depression, alcoholism, phobia, or lethargy enable the person to control others without accepting responsibility for doing so.”

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“Tao is not pursuing any purpose, and therefore is not meeting any difficulty.”

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“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.”

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“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”

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“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.”

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“The high art of a true Bodhisattva is possible only for him who has gone beyond all need for self-justification, for so long as there is something to prove, some ax to grind, there is no dance.”

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“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”

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

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“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.”

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“The test of liberation is not whether it issues in good works; the test of good works is whether they issue in liberation.”

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“There is absolutely no point in clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, and healing the sick if it is just that they may live to be naked, hungry, and sick again, or live merely to be able to do the same for others.”

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“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.”

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“There was never a moralist at any time who was not certain that things were going from bad to worse.”

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“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”

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“We have 16th century personalities in the world of 20th century concepts because social conventions lag far behind the flight of theoretical knowledge.”

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“When looking at the external world as a mirror, we may exclaim with amazement, 'Why, that's me!'”

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“When technology is used to increase employment rather than get rid of it, work becomes an artificial creation of ever more meaningless routines”

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“when we have Eros dominated by reason instead of Eros expressing itself with reason, we create a culture this is simply against life”

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“When we no longer confuse ourselves with the definition of ourselves that others have given us, we are at once universal and unique.”

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