Top 90 Brad Warner Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “The problem is the way we let our desires stand in the way of our enjoyment of what we already have.”

— Brad Warner

53. “It’s crazy to me how concerned people get with what it looks like and what you can do there. People may as well be talking about JRR Tolkien or Star Trek or something.”

— Brad Warner

54. “It’s interesting to see what’s going on with physics these days because they’re starting to come out with stuff that sounds remarkably like Buddhism and even more specifically like the ancient Hindu Vedas. Physics isn’t necessarily saying the exact same thing but I think eventually it will merge.”

— Brad Warner

55. “The fact is that there is a contradiction going on but our brains don’t like contradiction. So when Moe hits Curly on the head with a sledgehammer and Curly says, “ow” and Moe says, “Serves you right Numbskull”, you can say that’s because they’re separate beings, and that’s true.”

— Brad Warner

56. “The thinking brain influences the body’s responses and it makes a neat little loop.”

— Brad Warner

57. “You’ve won all creation. It’s yours to do with it as you please- and you discover what pleases you most is doing the right thing for all creation in moment after moment.”

— Brad Warner

58. “God is not the possession of any religion. If anything, religion can be a path away from God. God cannot be bound up inside churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. Those are just community centers where people gather to hang out with their friends. God is no more to be found in those places than he is in rock clubs or back-alley bars. God is in the wilderness, and God is in the city. Everywhere you go God is there. God walks with you. God is you, and God is the very act of walking.”

— Brad Warner

59. “Thus a person can be a Buddha one minute and a jackass three minutes later. You don’t just become Buddha at the moment of your first enlightenment experience and then stay Buddha forever.”

— Brad Warner

60. “Do what you do as well as you possibly can. That’s Buddhist morality.”

— Brad Warner

61. “So what I liked about Zen was that it never goes off into the realm of imagination land, or if it does occasionally, the good teachers will openly address it specifically as only imagination. Both of my teachers were very good at that.”

— Brad Warner

62. “I remember writing the post but not what I said specifically, so I’ll either repeat myself or say something completely different and baffle everybody.”

— Brad Warner

63. “People imagine enlightenment will make them incredibly powerful. And it does. It makes you the most powerful being in all the universe- but usually no one else notices.”

— Brad Warner

64. “Same deal here. It’s not “you” and “the universe.” It’s “universeyou.”

— Brad Warner

65. “I used to worry when I was a teenager, even into my twenties, after I’d heard something about schizophrenia and how people just suddenly become schizophrenic that I was insane.”

— Brad Warner

66. “I was very attracted to the way that Zen did not go into the imagination land. And now I’ve forgotten what your first question was and how we were going to tie this together.”

— Brad Warner

67. “As you’re implying, there’s a new technology that can look even deeper into that brick and we can start getting into a level where it breaks down so that the brick isn’t even there, but obviously it is because Moe can hit Curly on the head with it. It’s quite bizarre and all relative.”

— Brad Warner

68. “Nothing can be separated from everything else.”

— Brad Warner

69. “If we can all agree that none of us really knows what God actually is, maybe we can stop fighting about what we imagine God to be.”

— Brad Warner

70. “To him, Buddhism was not a spiritual practice or a religion. It was simply a practical approach to real life that neither denied the spiritual side of things nor held that spirituality was better or nobler than the material side of life. Whereas.”

— Brad Warner

71. “Rather than face what really is, we prefer to retreat and compare what we’re living through with the way we think it oughta be. Suffering comes from the comparison between the two.”

— Brad Warner

72. “Reality exists as it is. The words we use to explain our understanding of it are always pale reflections of the truth we are attempting to convey and of our own understanding of that truth.”

— Brad Warner

73. “Our actions are part of who we are. It’s not that we are inert things who do stuff. Rather, the stuff we do and who we are are inextricably woven together.”

— Brad Warner

74. “We just need to feel we know, or we can’t rest. And yet much of life is unknowable and will remain so. Lots.”

— Brad Warner

75. “I really thought Reagan was going to push the button and blow us all up. It was scary. So when they did the 1998 American Godzilla film, Hollywood didn’t understand what Godzilla was.”

— Brad Warner

76. “Not-being-a-jerk means this and that are done, and now you gotta do the other thing. It’s an ongoing process. Haku.”

— Brad Warner

77. “It’s sort of another innovation, probably a good innovation, of Western culture to separate the ideas between science and philosophy, but it’s important to remember they weren’t always separate realms of inquiry.”

— Brad Warner

78. “In conclusion, polishing a stone really does transform it into a mirror. If stones couldn’t become mirrors, regular people couldn’t become Buddhas. If we hate stones for being hunks of dirt, you might as well hate people for being hunks of dirt. If people have minds, stones must also have minds. Who can notice that there are mirrors in which stones are reflected? Who can notice that there are mirrors in which mirrors are reflected?”

— Brad Warner

79. “The entire moon and sky can be reflected in a dewdrop on a blade of grass.”

— Brad Warner

80. “There is no ultimate arbiter of right or wrong. In the whole vast universe, there is nobody who knows what you should do in any given situation any better than you do – not your mom and dad, not your best friend Alice, not the president or the pope, and certainly not God.”

— Brad Warner

81. “If you don’t want to be grabbed by God,” Zen teacher Jiyu Kennet said, “don’t stare at a wall. Definitely don’t sit still.”

— Brad Warner

82. “Truth doesn’t screw around, and truth doesn’t care about your opinions. It doesn’t care if you believe in it, deny it, or ignore it. It couldn’t care less what religion you are, what country you’re from, what color your skin is, what or who you’ve got between your legs, or how much you’ve got invested in mutual funds. None of the trivial junk that concerns most people most of the time matters even one teensy-weensy bit to the truth.”

— Brad Warner

83. “Often statues depicting the Buddha’s moment of enlightenment show him touching the ground. This symbolizes that his enlightened state included a firm grounding in this reality instead of serving as an escape from it.”

— Brad Warner

84. “The very sense of wondering is God wondering.”

— Brad Warner

85. “At best, past and future are no more than reference material for the eternal now. The only real facts are those at the present moment.”

— Brad Warner

86. “Dumb-bunnies think that if they don’t understand the dharma or memorize it, then there’s no benefit to even hearing it. They think that the best thing is to pursue knowledge and that if they forget what they’ve learned they might as well not have learned it at all.”

— Brad Warner

87. “The only way I know of to get in touch with what God wants is to be very, very, very quiet.”

— Brad Warner

88. “Effort is far more important than so-called success because effort is a real thing. What we call “success” is just the manifestation of our mind’s ability to categorize things. This is “success.”

— Brad Warner

89. “Transcending emotions doesn’t mean you have no feelings. You have them. But you recognize them for what they are and respond appropriately without letting them develop into what we call emotions, which are really just feelings that have been blown way out of proportion. A.”

— Brad Warner

90. “We live forever by practicing the Buddha Way right now. If we wind up being reborn after we pass from this life, that’s fine. If not, that’s okay too.”

— Brad Warner

91. “We always tend to think we can become happier by getting what we want, even if that means we have to make someone else suffer.”

— Brad Warner

92. “When I teach zazen I often tell people that it’s kind of like a yoga class where there is only one posture and you hold it for a very long time.”

— Brad Warner

93. “Buddhas do not make intentional efforts for this to happen,” he says; “it happens when they are activated by the moment of the present.” You get it when you allow the universe to act through you without hindering what it wants with your own petty needs and wishes.”

— Brad Warner