Top 90 Brad Warner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Disappointment is just the action of your brain readjusting itself to reality after discovering things are not the way you thought they were.”

— Brad Warner

2. “Compassion is the ability to see what needs doing right now and the willingness to do it right now.”

— Brad Warner

3. “You can always improve your situation. But you do so by facing it, not by running away.”

— Brad Warner

4. “The real goal of Zen is to find a way of life that’s easy and undramatic. Strong attachments lead to upset and drama.”

— Brad Warner

5. “The state of ambiguity – that messy, greasy, mixed-up, confused, and awful situation you’re living through right now – is enlightenment itself.”

— Brad Warner

6. “Reality’s all you’ve got. But here’s the real secret, the real miracle: it’s enough.”

— Brad Warner

7. “You can’t live in paradise – but you are living right here. Make this your paradise or make this your hell. The choice is entirely yours. Really.”

— Brad Warner

8. “Zen practice is about not getting high on anything and in so doing getting high on absolutely everything. We then find that everything we encounter – bliss or nonbliss – possesses a tremendous depth and beauty that we usually miss.”

— Brad Warner

9. “At times, Zen does get into some Buddhist Cosmology. Nishijima Roshi, my main teacher would talk about that and almost every time immediately say that it was only one way of looking at it. Whenever addressing realms of Heaven or Hell, he’d also address that it was just a psychological state.”

— Brad Warner

10. “No matter what we predict for our futures, we’re always wrong anyway. The only sensible thing to do is to live this life as it is right now. Leave what happens after you die till after you die.”

— Brad Warner

11. “Faith keeps you going, but doubt keeps you from going off the deep end.”

— Brad Warner

12. “He had the saffron robes, the shaved head, and that mellow spiritual way of talking that let you know here was a guy who had truly achieved a rare state of inner with-it-ness.”

— Brad Warner

13. “Morality is a personal matter.”

— Brad Warner

14. “When I first started watching Godzilla, I was a kid and a big dinosaur freak and was like, “Oh my gosh, there’s a big dinosaur.” So I immediately got into Godzilla. What I like about it are some of the things people often think are negative aspects.”

— Brad Warner

15. “Buddhism is all about finding your own way, not imitating the ways of others or even the ways of Buddha himself.”

— Brad Warner

16. “The truth comes when you can see that your self-image is just a convenient reference point and nothing more, and that you as you had imagined yourself do not exist.”

— Brad Warner

17. “What attracted me to Zen was my first teacher, Tim McCarthy. He was extremely genuine. It wasn’t even really a Zen thing, that sort of came along later.”

— Brad Warner

18. “Suffering occurs when your ideas about how things ought to be don’t match how they really are.”

— Brad Warner

19. “A lot of seriously insane people have managed to acquire huge followings based on the idea that their insanity is a kind of enlightenment. An obvious example would be Charles Manson or Shoko Asahara who is the person responsible for the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.”

— Brad Warner

20. “So I was first exposed to this guy Tim McCarthy, and he’s talking about Zen, but deeper than that he was a genuine person. I thought maybe he’s someone I can trust and follow this thing he’s talking about all the time.”

— Brad Warner

21. “Just know that your expectations are only thoughts in your head, and keep on doing what you do.”

— Brad Warner

22. “If a tree falls in the forest and it hits a mime, would he make a noise?”

— Brad Warner

23. “You can’t function in society if you don’t involve yourself in the fictions society accepts about time. But you do so with the understanding that you’re playing a game.”

— Brad Warner

24. “You won’t understand life and death until you’re ready to set aside any hope of understanding life and death and just live your life until you die.”

— Brad Warner

25. “So with science, it’s original idea was to ignore the spiritual or nebulous side of reality and to strictly work on concrete things. Say there’s a brick which we cut it in half and then see there’s two half’s of a brick. If we keep cutting we can then see there’s particles and so on and so forth.”

— Brad Warner

26. “Buddha might be the one thing that could settle Godzilla down. He might say, “Listen Godzilla, you don’t have to do all this. Just chill out a little bit and everything will be fine”.”

— Brad Warner

27. “But don’t get too hung up on the future. The future’s out of your control. Enjoy what’s happening right now. Do what is appropriate, what is right, in the present moment and let the future be the future.”

— Brad Warner

28. “So that’s Godzilla, he’s ultimately going to get you regardless of what you do. Maybe the people who made the American Godzilla film were scared of that. They didn’t want him to represent that, to represent something we couldn’t deal with because, “We’re American’s, we can deal with anything”.”

— Brad Warner

29. “How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!”

— Brad Warner

30. “I thought that deserved a book and feel like the door needs to be open so people can say, “Ok, here we go, let’s deal with this” because we’re not dealing with it. I’m waiting for somebody to write another book but it hasn’t happened yet, though I guess mine’s only been out for a year and a half.”

— Brad Warner

31. “The pain of having your dreams come true appears vividly when you realize that even if your dreams really come true, they never really come true. From birth to death it’s just like this.”

— Brad Warner

32. “I think the understanding of oneness and interconnectivity of the whole Universe is something we have innately, something we’re born with. We are however very skillful at ignoring and pretending we don’t have or know it.”

— Brad Warner

33. “But people do the same thing with the Bible. They memorize all the fictional characters, the parameters and the rules of the game and think it’s important, but I can’t get excited about that myself.”

— Brad Warner

34. “As for enlightenment, that’s just for people who can’t face reality.”

— Brad Warner

35. “If you want to believe in reincarnation, you have to believe that this life, what you’re living through right now, is the afterlife. You’re missing out on the afterlife you looked forward to in your last existence by worrying about your next life. This is what happens after you die. Take a look.”

— Brad Warner

36. “It may look like we’re doing nothing when we sit zazen. But actually we are exposing ourselves to ourselves.”

— Brad Warner

37. “Zazen isn’t about blissing out or going into an alpha brain-wave trance. It’s about facing who and what you really are, in every single goddamn moment. And you aren’t bliss, I’ll tell you that right now. You’re a mess. We all are.”

— Brad Warner

38. “The thing with the question of oneness or non-oneness is that you can literally discuss it forever. You can go into the philosophy section of any library and you’ll see people have been discussing it forever and will continue to do so.”

— Brad Warner

39. “So I’m skeptical and cynical about the whole thing and it’s only if something seems to be genuine that I would pursue it. That’s why I’ve stuck with Zen for so long and not gone on to some other path with it.”

— Brad Warner

40. “Everything you have, whether it’s money or stuff, is an obligation. It is as much your duty to care for and nurture any object you own as it would be if that object were your child. All possessions come with responsibilities. More possessions equals greater responsibility.”

— Brad Warner

41. “In the Japanese movie’s they’re throwing everything they have at him, every missile, but he keeps coming, he can’t be stopped and that represents death. There’s nothing you can do to stop it, to keep yourself from dying. You can try every trick in the book and it still won’t prevent it.”

— Brad Warner

42. “Real morality is based on a single criterion: right action, appropriate action, in the present moment and present situation.”

— Brad Warner

43. “I mean, I can do that all day long. I can tell you the Vulcan’s are not actually devoid of emotion. That they work hard to suppress their emotions. And of course, there actually are no real Vulcan’s, though I know the ins and outs of them as fictional characters.”

— Brad Warner

44. “The trick to not thinking is not adding energy to the equation in an effort to forcibly stop thinking from happening. It’s more a matter of subtracting energy from the equation in order not to barf the thoughts up and start chewing them over again.”

— Brad Warner

45. “Consider this: 1. Would you ride in a car whose driver was on the consciousness-expanding “entheogenic” drug LSD? And here’s a bonus question: 2. Why does an “expanded consciousness” include the inability to operate a motor vehicle?”

— Brad Warner

46. “Truly compassionate action arises spontaneously without thought and is carried out in real action with no anticipation of reward and, indeed, no concept of a doer of that action.”

— Brad Warner

47. “For a very long time science and philosophy were considered part of the same continuum and it was only within the last few hundred years they’ve been considered different areas of inquiry, and now we’re starting to go back to the idea that maybe they aren’t two separate realms of inquiry.”

— Brad Warner

48. “Because a lot of our philosophical stances these days are kind of half-assed. We’re very bold in our proclamations of our own moral rectitude, but then we neglect to even keep our own toilets clean. You see a lot of that kind of thing. I used to see it all the time in my punk-rock days. Those guys were super-concerned with having the right political and philosophical views. But they never seemed to be able to keep their showers free from mold or.”

— Brad Warner

49. “People will come and give you sandwiches every six hours but you’re really of no use. A lot of people get excited about guys like that but I can’t get too excited about it because I think he’s sorta useless. He’s just sitting there in India under a blanket looking beautiful, so what.”

— Brad Warner

50. “It’s hard for most of us to admit, but when you start paying attention you’ll notice that you actually enjoy being angry. There’s this wonderful rush of self-righteousness to it. Because, obviously, you can’t be angry about something unless you know you’re right and the other person is wrong. You.”

— Brad Warner