Top 90 D.T. Suzuki Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The right art is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede.”

— D.T. Suzuki

52. “A simple fishing boat in the midst of the rippling waters is enough to awaken in the mind of the beholder a sense of vastness of the sea and at the same time of peace and contentment – the Zen sense oof the alone.”

— D.T. Suzuki

53. “The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics.”

— D.T. Suzuki

54. “The way to ascend unto God is to descend into one’s self”; – these are Hugo’s words. “If thou wishest to search out the deep things of God, search out the depths of thine own spirit”;.”

— D.T. Suzuki

55. “I raise my hand; I take a book from the other side of this desk; I hear the boys playing ball outside my window; I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighboring woods:-in all these I am practicing Zen, I am living Zen. No worldly discussion is necessary, or any explanation.”

— D.T. Suzuki

56. “Eternity is the Absolute present.”

— D.T. Suzuki

57. “If you have attained something, this is the surest proof that you have gone astray. Therefore, not to have is to have, silence is thunder, ignorance is enlightenment.”

— D.T. Suzuki

58. “The truth of Zen, just a little bit of it, is what turns one’s humdrum life, a life of monotonous, uninspiring commonplaceness, into one of art, full of genuine inner creativity.”

— D.T. Suzuki

59. “Art always has something of the unconscious about it.”

— D.T. Suzuki

60. “Among the most remarkable features characterizing Zen we find these: spirituality, directness of expression, disregard of form or conventionalism, and frequently an almost wanton delight in going astray from respectability.”

— D.T. Suzuki

61. “Copying is slavery. The letter must never be followed, only the spirit is to be grasped. Higher affirmations live in the spirit. And where is the spirit? Seek it in your everyday experience, and therein lies abundance of proof for all you need.”

— D.T. Suzuki

62. “The fighter is to be always single-minded with one object in view: to fight, looking neither backward nor sidewise. To go straight forward in order to crush the enemy is all that is necessary for him.”

— D.T. Suzuki

63. “The mistake consists in our splitting into two what is really and absolutely one. Is not life one as we live it, which we cut to pieces by recklessly applying the murderous knife of intellectual surgery?”

— D.T. Suzuki

64. “The greatest productions of art, whether painting, music, sculpture or poetry, have invariably this quality-something approaching the work of God.”

— D.T. Suzuki

65. “Zen opens a man’s eyes to the greatest mystery as it is daily and hourly performed; it enlarges the heart to embrace eternity of time and infinity of space in its every palpitation; it makes us live in the world as if walking in the garden of Eden.”

— D.T. Suzuki

66. “Zen purposes to discipline the mind itself, to make it its own master, through an insight into its proper nature. This getting into the real nature of one’s own mind or soul is the fundamental object of Zen Buddhism. Zen, therefore, is more than meditation and Dhyana in its ordinary sense. The discipline of Zen consists in opening the mental eye in order to look into the very reason of existence.”

— D.T. Suzuki

67. “No amount of wordy explanations will ever lead us into the nature of our own selves. The more you explain, the further it runs away from you. It is like trying to get hold of your own shadow. You run after it and it runs with you at the identical rate of speed.”

— D.T. Suzuki

68. “In Christianity we seem to be too conscious of God, though we say that in him we live and move and have our being. Zen wants to have this last trace of God-consciousness, if possible, obliterated. That is why Zen masters advise us not to linger where the Buddha is, and to pass quickly away where he is not.”

— D.T. Suzuki

69. “Zen perceives and feels, and does not abstract and meditate. Zen penetrates and is finally lost in the immersion. Meditation, on the other hand, is outspokenly dualistic and consequently inevitably superficial.”

— D.T. Suzuki

70. “The basic idea of Zen is to come in touch with the inner workings of our being, and to do so in the most direct way possible, without resorting to anything external or superadded.”

— D.T. Suzuki

71. “But nothing awakens religious consciousness like suffering.”

— D.T. Suzuki

72. “Zen has nothing to do with letters, words, or sutras.”

— D.T. Suzuki

73. “When we know the reason, there is satori and we have Zen. Whereas with the God of mysticism there is the grasping of a definite object; when you have God, what is no-God is excluded. This is self-limiting. Zen wants absolute freedom, even from God.”

— D.T. Suzuki

74. “In Zen there must be satori; there must be a general mental upheaval which destroys the old accumulations of intellection and lays down the foundation for a new life; there must be the awakening of a new sense which will review the old things from a hitherto undreamed-of angle of observation.”

— D.T. Suzuki

75. “Taking it all in all, Zen is emphatically a matter of personal experience; if anything can be called radically empirical, it is Zen. No amount of reading, no amount of teaching, no amount of contemplation will ever make one a Zen master. Life itself must be grasped in the midst of its flow; to stop it for examination and analysis is to kill it, leaving its cold corpse to be embraced.”

— D.T. Suzuki

76. “Perhaps there is after all nothing mysterious in Zen. Everything is open to your full view. If you eat your food and keep yourself cleanly dressed and work on the farm to raise your rice or vegetables, you are doing all that is required of you on this earth, and the infinite is realized in you.”

— D.T. Suzuki

77. “However insistently the blind may deny the existence of the sun, they cannot annihilate it.”

— D.T. Suzuki

78. “When a thing is denied, the very denial involves something not denied.”

— D.T. Suzuki

79. “How hard, then, and yet how easy it is to understand Zen! Hard because to understand it is not to understand it; easy because not to understand it is to understand it.”

— D.T. Suzuki

80. “They justly compare Zen to lightning. The rapidity, however, does not constitute Zen; its naturalness, its freedom from artificialities, its being expressive of life itself, its originality – these are the essential characteristics of Zen.”

— D.T. Suzuki

81. “Zen professes itself to be the spirit of Buddhism, but in fact it is the spirit of all religions and philosophies. When Zen is thoroughly understood, absolute peace of mind is attained, and a man lives as he ought to live.”

— D.T. Suzuki

82. “Emptiness constantly falls within our reach. It is always with us, and conditions all our knowledge, all our deeds and is our life itself. It is only when we attempt to pick it up and hold it forth as something before our eyes that it eludes us, frustrates all our efforts and vanishes like vapor.”

— D.T. Suzuki

83. “Christians as well as Buddhists can practise Zen just as big fish and small fish are both contentedly living in the same ocean. Zen is the ocean, Zen is the air, Zen is the mountain, Zen is thunder and lightning, the spring flower, summer heat, and winter snow; nay, more than that, Zen is the man.”

— D.T. Suzuki

84. “We have never lost Paradise, but human consciousness tells us we have lost it and that we have to regain it. But in fact, Paradise has never been lost, Paradise is never to be therefore regained. We are in Eden, just as we are now.”

— D.T. Suzuki

85. “When mind discriminates, there is manifoldness of things; when it does not it looks into the true state of things.”

— D.T. Suzuki

86. “Some say that as Zen is admittedly a form of mysticism it cannot claim to be unique in the history of religion. Perhaps so; but Zen is a mysticism of its own order. It is mystical in the sense that the sun shines, that the flower blooms, that I hear at this moment somebody beating a drum in the street. If these are mystical facts, Zen is brim-full of them.”

— D.T. Suzuki

87. “Zen has from the beginning made clear and insisted upon the main thesis, which is to see into the work of creation; the creator may be found busy moulding his universe, or he may be absent from his workshop, but Zen goes on with its own work. It is not dependent upon the support of a creator; when it grasps the reason for living a life, it is satisfied.”

— D.T. Suzuki

88. “If we really want to get to the bottom of life, we must abandon our cherished syllogisms, we must acquire a new way of observation whereby we can escape the tyranny of logic and the one-sidedness of our everyday phraseology.”

— D.T. Suzuki

89. “When Nangaku was approaching Yeno, the Sixth Patriarch, and was questioned, “What is it that thus walks toward me?” he did not know what to answer. For eight long years he pondered the question, when one day it dawned upon him, and he exclaimed, “Even to say it is something does not hit the mark”. This is the same as saying, “I do not know”.”

— D.T. Suzuki

90. “As far as content goes, there is none in either satori or Zen that can be described or presented or demonstrated for your intellectual appreciation. For Zen has no business with ideas, and satori is a sort of inner perception – not the perception, indeed, of a single individual object but the perception of Reality itself, so to speak. The ultimate destination of satori is towards the Self; it has no other end but to be back within oneself.”

— D.T. Suzuki

91. “Is satori something that is not at all capable of intellectual analysis? Yes, it is an experience which no amount of explanation or argument can make communicable to others unless the latter themselves had it previously. If satori is amenable to analysis in the sense that by so doing it becomes perfectly clear to another who has never had it, that satori will be no satori. For a satori turned into a concept ceases to be itself; and there will no more be a Zen experience.”

— D.T. Suzuki

92. “In the study of Zen, the power of an all-illuminating insight must go hand in hand with a deep sense of humility and meekness of heart.”

— D.T. Suzuki