Top 30 Wei Wu Wei Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself – and there isn’t one.”

— Wei Wu Wei

Featured in: Ego Quotes

2. “Spontaneity is being present in the present.”

— Wei Wu Wei

3. “I AM Here Now As This.”

— Wei Wu Wei

Featured in: Be Yourself Quotes, Taoism Quotes, Zen Quotes

4. “Wise men don’t judge: They seek to understand.”

— Wei Wu Wei

5. “Never forget, what your looking for is what is looking.”

— Wei Wu Wei

6. “Realisation is a matter of becoming conscious of that which is already realised.”

— Wei Wu Wei

7. “Play your part in the comedy, but don’t identify yourself with your role.”

— Wei Wu Wei

8. “In order to be effective truth must penetrate like an arrow – and that is likely to hurt.”

— Wei Wu Wei

9. “What do you have to do? Pack your bags, Go to the station without them, Catch the train, And leave your self behind.”

— Wei Wu Wei

10. “Worshiping the teapot instead of drinking the tea.”

— Wei Wu Wei

11. “As long as there is a ‘you’ doing or not-doing, thinking or not-thinking, ‘meditating’ or ‘not-meditating’ you are no closer to home than the day you were born.”

— Wei Wu Wei

12. “We ourselves are not an illusory part of Reality; rather are we Reality itself illusorily conceived.”

— Wei Wu Wei

13. “What is your trouble? Mistaken identity.”

— Wei Wu Wei

14. “There is no mystery whatever – only inability to perceive the obvious.”

— Wei Wu Wei

15. “We do not possess an ‘ego.’ We are possessed by the idea of one.”

— Wei Wu Wei

16. “Are we not wasps who spend all day in a fruitless attempt to traverse a window-pane – while the other half of the window is wide open?”

— Wei Wu Wei

17. “Reintegration with Nature, which we are, is the recovery of spontaneity.”

— Wei Wu Wei

18. “Do not mistake the pointing finger for the moon.”

— Wei Wu Wei

19. “All the evil in the world, and all the unhappiness, comes from the I-concept.”

— Wei Wu Wei

20. “Transcendence implies the surpassing of two things, and the consequent attainment of a third thing. But there are no ‘things’ in reality, of any kind whatever: there is only the thing-in-itself, its suchness, which is Reality, revealed when the illusory dualism of inexistent qualities is dissolved.”

— Wei Wu Wei

21. “It is only with total humility, and in absolute stillness of mind that we can know what indeed we are.”

— Wei Wu Wei

22. “Past and Future are a duality of which Present is the reality. The now-moment alone is eternal and real.”

— Wei Wu Wei

23. “We imagine that waking-life is real and that dream-life is unreal, but there does not seem to be any evidence for this belief.”

— Wei Wu Wei

24. “The only real service we can render to that which we perceive and interpret in phenomenal existence as ‘others’ is by awakening to universal consciousness ourselves.”

— Wei Wu Wei

25. “The practice of meditation is represented by the three monkeys, who cover their eyes, ears and mouths so as to avoid the phenomenal world.”

— Wei Wu Wei

26. “The saint is a man who disciplines his ego. The sage is a man who rids himself of his ego.”

— Wei Wu Wei

27. “The notion that human life has greater value than any other form of life is both unjustifiable and arrogant.”

— Wei Wu Wei

28. “The qualities we possess should never be a matter for satisfaction, but the qualities we have discarded.”

— Wei Wu Wei

29. “A man who is seeking for realization is not only going around searching for his spectacles without realizing that they are on his nose all the time, but also were he not actually looking through them he would not be able to see what he is looking for!”

— Wei Wu Wei

30. “Living should be perpetual and universal benediction.”

— Wei Wu Wei

31. “The writer of these lines has nothing whatsoever to teach anyone; his words are just his contribution to our common discussion of what must inevitably be for us the most important subject which could be discussed by sentient beings.”

— Wei Wu Wei

32. “It is less what one is that should matter, than what one is not.”

— Wei Wu Wei

33. “It is only the artificial ego that suffers. The man who has transcended his false “me” no longer identifies himself with his suffering.”

— Wei Wu Wei