How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

The ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I will pay more for that ability than for any other under the sun. – John D. Rockefeller

Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within his limits. He possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. – Professor William James of Harvard

Education is the ability to meet life’s situations. – Dr. John G. Hibben, former president of Princeton University

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action. – Herbert Spencer

If you teach a man anything, he will never learn. – Bernard Shaw

• Learning is an active process. We learn by doing… Apply these rules at every opportunity… Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.

Part One: Fundamental Techniques in Handling People

Principle 1: Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.

• Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because of it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.

As much as we thirst for approval, we dread condemnation. – Hans Selye

Don’t criticize them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances. – Lincoln

• When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

I will speak ill of no man and speak all the good I know of everybody. – Benjamin Franklin

• Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do.
• Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness.
  • To know all is to forgive all.

God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days. – Dr. Johnson

Principle 2: Give honest and sincere appreciation.

The desire to be important. – Dr. Dewey

Everybody likes a compliment. The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. – William James

I consider my ability to arouse enthusiasm among my people the greatest asset I possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. – Charles Schwab

• Appreciation is sincere – it comes from the heart out and it is unselfish.
  • Flattery is insincere – it comes from the teeth out and it is selfish.

I shall pass this way but once; any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

Principle 3: Arouse in the other person an eager want.

• The only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.
  • Before you speak, pause and ask yourself: “How can I make this person want to do it?”
  • Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own. – Henry Ford

• Customers like to feel that they are buying – not being sold.

People who can put themselves in the place of other people, who can understand the workings of their mind, need never worry about what the future has in store for them. – Owen D. Young

First, arouse in the other person an eager want. He who can do this has the whole world with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way. – Professor Overstreet

Self-expression is the dominant necessity of human nature. – William Winter

• When we have a brilliant idea, instead making others think it is ours, why not let them cook and stir the idea themselves. They will then regard it as their own; they will like it and maybe eat a couple of helpings of it.

Part Two: Six Ways to Make People Like You

1. Become genuinely interested in other people.

It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring. – Alfred Adler

• A tactic to show interest in other people: stage a debate and ask someone for his/her expertise.

We are interested in others when they are interested in us. – Publilius Syrus

2. Smile.

• Actions speak louder than words, and a smile says, “I like you. You make me happy. I am glad to see you.”

Actions seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. – William James

• Happiness does not depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.

There is nothing either good or bad. But thinking makes it so. – Shakespeare

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. – Abe Lincoln

Whenever you go out-of-doors, draw the chin in, carry the crown of the head high, and fill the lungs to the utmost; drink in the sunshine; greet your friends with a smile, and put soul into every handclasp. Do not fear being misunderstood and do not waste a minute thinking about your enemies. Try to fix firmly in your mind what you would like to do; and then, without veering off direction, you will move straight to the goal. Keep your mind on the great and splendid things you would like to do, and then, as the days go gliding away, you will find yourself unconsciously seizing upon the opportunities that are required for the fulfillment of your desire, just as the coral insect takes from the ruining tide the element it needs. Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful person you desire to be, and the thought you hold is hourly transforming you into that particular individual… Thought is supreme. Preserve a right mental attitude – the attitude of courage, frankness, and good cheer. To think rightly is to create. All things come through desire and every sincere prayer is answered. We become like that on which our hearts are fixed. Carry your chin in and the crown of your head high. We are gods in the chrysalis. – Elbert Hubbard

3. Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.

Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. – Emerson

• The name sets the individual apart; it makes him or her unique among all others.

4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.

Few human beings are proof against the implied flattery of rapt attention. – Jacky Woodford, Strangers in Love

There is no mystery about successful business intercourse… Exclusive attention to the person who is speaking to you is very important. Nothing else is so flattering as that. – Charles W. Elliot, former Harvard president

• If you aspired to be a good conversationalist, be an attentive listener. To be interesting, be interested. Ask questions that other persons will enjoy answering.

5. Talk in terms of the other person’s interest.

• The royal road to a person’s heart is to talk about the things he or she treasures most.

6. Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.

• The law is this: Always make the other person feel important.

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. – John Dewey

• Little courteous phrases that oil the cogs of the monotonous grind of everyday life:
  • I’m sorry to trouble you
  • Would you be so kind to … ?
  • Would you mind?

Talk to people about themselves and they will listen for hours. – Disraeli

Part Three: How to Win People to Your Way of Thinking

1. The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.

A man convinced against his will
Is of the same opinion still.

• … the more I argued against it, the more my prospect argued in favor of it; and the more he argued, the more he sold himself on my competitor’s product.

Hatred is never ended by hatred but by love. – Buddha

• A misunderstanding is never ended by an argument but by tact, diplomacy, conciliation and a sympathetic desire to see the other person’s viewpoint.

Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite. – Lincoln

2. Show respect for the other person’s opinions.  Never say “You’re wrong.”

• … but you will not alter their opinion, for you have hurt their feelings.

Men must be taught as if you taught them not
And things unknown proposed as things forgot. – Alexander Pope

A third kind of thinking is stimulated when anyone questions our belief and opinions. We sometimes find ourselves changing our minds without any resistance or heavy emotion, but if we are told that we are wrong we resent the imputation and harden our hearts. We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem, which is threatened… The little word “my” is the most important one in all human affairs, and properly to reckon with it is the beginning of wisdom. It has the same force whether it is my dinner, my dog, and my house, or my faith, my country, and my God. We not only resent the imputation that our watch is wrong, or our car shabby, but that our conception of the canals of Mars, of the pronunciation of “Epictetus”, of the medicinal value of salicine, or the date of Sargon I, are subject to revision… Few of us take the pains to study the origin of our cherished convictions; indeed, we have a natural repugnance to so doing. We like to continue to believe what we have been accustomed to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to them. The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do. – James Harvey Robinson, The Mind in the Making

I have found it of enormous value when I can permit myself to understand the other person. The way in which I have worded this statement may seem strange to you… Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what the meaning of the statement is to the other person. – Carl Rogers

3. If you’re wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.

• There is a certain degree of satisfaction in having the courage to admit one’s errors.  It not only clears the air of guilt and defensiveness, but often helps solve the problem created by the error.
• Any fool can try to defend his or her mistakes – and most fools do – but it raises one above the herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exultation to admit one’s mistakes.

By fighting you never get enough, but by yielding you get more than you expected.

4. Begin in a friendly way.

If you come at me with your fists doubled, I think I can promise you that mine will double as fast as yours; but if you come to me and say, ‘Let us sit down and take counsel together, and if we differ from each other, understand why it is that we differ, just what the points at issue are,’ we will presently find that we are not so far apart after all, that the points on which we differ are few and that if we only have patience and the candor and the desire to get together, we will get together. – Woodrow Wilson

• If a man’s heart is rankling with discard and ill feeling toward you, you can’t win him to your way of thinking with all the logic in Christendom. Scolding parents and domineering bosses and husbands and nagging wives ought to realize that people don’t want to change their minds. They can’t be forced or driven to agree with you or me. But they may possibly be led to, if we are gentle and friendly, ever so gentle and ever so friendly.

It is an old and true maxim that “a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.” So with men, if you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart; which, says what you will, is the great high road to his reason. – Lincoln

5. Get the other person saying “Yes, Yes” immediately.

• In talking with people, don’t begin by discussing the things on which you differ. Begin by emphasizing – and keep emphasizing – the things on which you agree.
• The skillful speaker gets, at the outset, a number of “Yes” responses. This sets the psychological process of the listeners moving in the affirmative direction.

He who treads softly goes far. – Chinese proverb

6. Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.

• Almost every successful person likes to reminiscent about his early struggles.

7. Let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers.

• Example: I want you to do me a little favor. Here are some uncompleted sketches. Won’t you please tell me how we could finish them up in such a way that you could use them?
• Example: They are not perfect. We know that, and we want to improve them. So we should be deeply obligated to you if you could find time to look them over and give us your ideas about how they can be made more serviceable to your profession.

The reason why rivers and seas receive the homage of a hundred mountain streams is that they keep below them.  Thus they are able to reign over all the mountain streams.  So the sage, wishing to be above men, putteth himself below them; wishing to be before them, he putteth himself behind them.  Thus, though his place be above men, they do not feel his weight; though his place be before them, they do not count it an injury. -  Laozi

8. Try honestly to see things from the other person’s point of view.

• … by becoming interested in the cause, we are less likely to dislike the effect.

Starting your conversation by giving the other person the purpose or direction of your conversation, governing what you say by what you would want to hear if you were the listener, and accepting his or her viewpoint will encourage the listener to have an open mind to your idea. – Dr. Gerald S. Nirenberg, Getting Through to People

9. Be sympathetic with the other person’s ideas and desires.

10. Appeal to the nobler motives.

• If you are satisfied with the result you are now getting, why change? If you are not satisfied, why not experiment?
• … people are honest and want to discharge their obligations.

11. Dramatize your ideas.

• Merely stating a truth isn’t enough. The truth has to be made vivid, interesting, dramatic. You have to use showmanship.

12. Throw down a challenge.

All men have fears, but the brave put down their fears and go forward, sometimes to death, but always to victory. – Motto of the King’s Guard in ancient Greece

• Every successful person loves: the game. The chance for self-expression… The desire to excel.

Part Four: Be a leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment

1. Begin with praise and honest appreciation.

• A barber lathers a man before he shaves him…

2. Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.

• Change the word from “but” to “and.”

3. Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.

4. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.

• “You might consider this,” or “Do you think that would work?” “What do you think of this?”
• [Always giving people the opportunity to do things themselves and let them learn from their mistakes] A technique like this saves a person’s pride and gives him or her a feeling of importance. It encourages cooperation instead of rebellion.
• Asking questions not only makes an order more palatable; it often stimulates the creativity of the persons whom you ask. People are more likely to accept an order if they have had a part in the decision that caused the order to be issued.

5. Let the other person save face.

I have no right to say or do anything that diminishes a man in his own eyes.  What matters is not what I think of him, but what he thinks of himself.  Hurting a man in his dignity is a crime.  – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

6. Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement.  Be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.”

Praise is like sunlight to the human spirit; we cannot flower and grow without it. And yet, while most of us are only too ready to apply to others the cold wind of criticism, we are somehow reluctant to give our fellows the warm sunshine of praise. – Jess Lair

• … when criticism is minimized and praise emphasized, the good things people do will be reinforced and the poorer things will atrophy for lack of attention.
• Because he had singled out a specific accomplishment, rather than just making general flattering remarks, his praise became much more meaningful to the person to whom it was given.
  • Specific praise comes across as sincere.
  • Remember, we all crave appreciation and recognition, and will do almost anything to get it.  But nobody wants insincerity.  Nobody wants flattery.
  • Abilities wither under criticism; they blossom under encouragement.

7. Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.

Assume a virtue, if you have it not. – Shakespeare

• If you want to improve a person in a certain respect, act as though that particular trait were already one of his or her outstanding characteristics.
  • It might be well to assume and state openly that other people have the virtue that you want them to develop.
  • Give them a fine reputation to live up to, and they will make prodigious efforts rather than see you disillusioned.
  • Example: I have respected the fact that you are always willing to listen and are big enough to change your mind when the facts warrant a change.

8. Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.

9. Make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

• Always make the other person happy about doing the thing you suggest.

Keep the following guideline in mind when it is necessary to change attitudes or behavior:

1. Be sincere.  do not promise anything that you cannot deliver.  Forget about the benefits to yourself and concentrate on the benefits to the other person.
2. Know exactly what it is that you want the other person do.
3. Be empathetic.  Ask yourself what it is the other person really wants.
4. Consider the benefits that person will receive from doing what you suggest.
5. Match those benefits to the other person’s wants.
6. When you make your request, put it in a form that will convey to the other person the idea that he personally will benefit. (e.g. If it is done now, we won’t be faced with it later.)

Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel By Rolf Potts

• Vagabonding defined:
  • The act of leaving behind the orderly world to travel independently for an extended period of time.
  • A privately meaningful manner of travel that emphasizes creativity, adventure, awareness, simplicity, discovery, independence, realism, self-reliance, and the growth of the spirit.
  • A deliberate way of living that makes freedom to travel possible.
  • Latin-derived term that refers to a wanderer with no fixed home.
  • Vagabonding has always been a private choice within a society that is constantly urging us to do otherwise.
• This book views long-term travel not as an escape but as an adventure and a passion – a way of overcoming your fears and living life to the fullest.

Research your own experiences for the truth… Absorb what is useful… Add what is specifically your own… The creating individual is more than any style or system. – Bruce Lee

• Out of insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don’t really need – we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called “lifestyle,” travel becomes just another accessory – a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase the same way we buy clothing and furniture.
  • Ultimately, this shotgun wedding of time and money has a way of keeping us in a holding pattern. The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we are too poor to buy our freedom.
  • In reality, long-term travel has nothing to do with demographics – age, ideology, income – and everything to do with personal outlook.
  • Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions.
  • Vagabonding is about looking for adventure in normal life, and normal life within adventure.

[We end up spending] the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it. – Henry David Thoreau

• … rooting ourselves to a home or a career and using the future as a kind of phony ritual that justifies the present.
• Vagabonding is the ongoing practice of looking and learning, of facing fears and altering habits, of cultivating new fascination with people and places.
  • Vagabonding is a personal act that demands only realignment of self.

And they say in truth that a man is made of desire. As his desire is, so is his faith. As his faith is, so are his works. As his works are, so he becomes. – The Supreme Teaching of the Upanishads

Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month? The boy who made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this – or the body who had… received a Rodger’s penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers? – Henry David Thoreau

• [Trustafarians] Because they never worked for their freedom, their travel experiences have no personal reference – no connection to the rest of their lives.
  • They are spending plenty of time and money on the road, but they never spent enough of themselves to begin with. Thus, their experience of travel has a diminished sense of value.
• The “meaningful” part of travel always starts at home, with a personal investment in the wonders to come.
• Work is how you settle your financial and emotional debts – so that your travels are not an escape from your real life but a discovery of your real life.

Wanting to travel reflects a positive attitude. You want to see, to grow in experience, and presumably to become more whole as a human being. Vagabonding takes this a step further: it promotes the chances of sustaining and strengthening this positive attitude. As a vagabond, you begin to face your fear now and then instead of continuously sidestepping them in the name of convenience. You build an attitude that makes the life more rewarding, which in turn makes it easier to keep doing it. It’s called positive feedback, and it works. – Ed Buryn, Vagabonding in Europe and North Africa

• However you choose to fund your travel freedom, keep in mind that your work is an active part of your travel attitude.

We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis. – Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

• List the job skills travel has taught you: independence, flexibility, negotiation, planning, boldness, self-sufficiency, improvisation.

A lot of us first aspired to far-ranging travel and exotic adventure early in our teens; these ambitions are, in fact, adolescent in nature, which I find an inspiring idea… Thus, when we allow ourselves to imagine as we once did, we know, with a sudden jarring clarity, that if we don’t go right now, we’re never going to do it. And we’ll be haunted by our unrealized dreams and know that we have sinned against ourselves gravely. – Tim Cahill, Exotic Places Made Me Do  It

• …travel allows you to experience the nuances of the world in a way that mass media never will.
• Indeed, the freedom to go vagabonding has never been determined by income level; it’s fund through simplicity – the conscious decision of how to use what income you have.
  • Simplicity merely requires a bit of personal sacrifice: an adjustment of your habits and routines within consumer society itself.
  • At times, the biggest challenge in embracing simplicity will be the vague feeling of isolation that comes with it, since private sacrifice doesn’t garner much attention in the frenetic world of mass culture.

Our crude civilization engenders a multitude of wants… Our forefathers forges chains of duty and habit, which bind us notwithstanding our boasted freedom, and we ourselves in desperation, add link to link, groaning and making medicinal laws for relief. – John Muir, Kindred and Related Spirits

… the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want… general junk you always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of [it] impersonal in a system of work, produce, consume. – Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

• … neither self nor wealth can be measured in terms of what you consume or own.

[Seeking happiness in one’s material desires is absurd as] suffering because a banana tree will not bear mangos. – Buddha

• Despite several millennia of such warnings, however, there is still an overwhelming social compulsion – an insanity of consensus, if you will – to get rich from life rather than live richly, to “do well” in the world instead of living well.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune, Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing. – Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

By switching to a new game, which in this case involves vagabonding, time becomes the only possession and everyone is equally rich in it by biological inheritance. Money, of course, is still needed to survive, but time is what you need to live. So, save what little money you possess to meet basic survival requirements, but spend your time lavishly in order to create the life values that make the fire worth the candle. – Ed Buryn

Travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: one the road, we often live more simply, with no more possession than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance. This is what Camus meant when he said that “what gives value to travel is fear.” – disruption, in other words (or emancipation), from circumstance and all the habits behind which we hide. – Pico Iyer, Why We Travel

• There are three general methods to simplifying your life: stopping expansion, reining in your routine, and reducing clutter.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

• Vagabonding is, was, and always will be a private undertaking – and its goal is to improve your life not in relation to your neighbors but in relation to yourself.
• Indeed, not only does simplicity save you money and buy you time; it also makes you more adventuresome, forces you into sincere contact with locals, and allows you the independence to follow your passions and curiosities down exciting new roads.

My greatest skill has been to want little. – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone. – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

• Vagabonding is not just a process of discovering the world but a way of seeing – an attitude that prepares you to find the things you weren’t looking for.

It is fatal to know too much at the outset; boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his routes as the novelist who is overcertain of his plot. – Paul Theroux, To the Ends of the Earth

• The key to preparation is to strike a balance between knowing what’s out there and being optimistically ignorant.
• The gift of the information age is knowing your options – not your destiny – and those people who plan their travels with the idea of eliminating all uncertainty and unpredictability are missing out on the whole point of leaving home in the first place.
• The goal of preparation is not knowing exactly where you’ll go but being confident nonetheless that you’ll get there. This means that your attitude will be more important than your itinerary, and that the simple willingness to improvise more vital, in the long run, than research.

Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity… no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. – John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

• A lot of media information – especially day-to-day news – should be approached with a healthy amount of skepticism. This is because so many media outlets are more in the business of competing for your attention than giving you a balanced picture of the world.

A good traveler has no fixed plan, and is not intent on arriving. – Laozi, The Way of Life

• Human-centered adventures

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to practical bum is not difficult. He has built-in garden of reason to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. – John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley

Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgment. The traveler was a student of what he sought. – Paul Fussell, Abroad

• … moderate the amount of time you spend online as you travel – since nothing stifles your vagabonding flexibility quite like the compulsive urge to stay connected to the modern world.
• Vagabonding is not like bulk shopping: The value of our travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home – and the slow, nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty counties.
• Never underestimate your ability to learn and adapt quickly – and don’t waste time fretting about every possibility that might come your way on the road.
  • Simple courage is worth far more than detailed logistics, and a confident, positive, ready-to-learn attitude will make up for any travel savvy you lack at the outset.

Travel, there is no path
path are made by walking. – Antonio Machado, Cantores

• Buddhists believe that we live our everyday lives as if inside an eggshell. Just a an unhatched chicken has few clues about what life is truly like, most of us are only vaguely aware of the greater world that surrounds us.

Excitement and depression, fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain are storms in a tiny, private, shell-bound realm – which we take to be the whole fo existence. Yet we can break out of this shell and enter a new world. – Eknath Easwaran

Travel in general, vagabonding in particular, produces an awesome density of experiences… a cramming together of incidents, impressions and life detail that is both stimulating and exhausting. So much new and different happens to you so frequently, just when you’re most sensitive to it… You may be excited, bored, confused, desperate and amazed all in the same happy day. – Ed Buryn

I don’t want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. – Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

• At home, you’re conditioned to get to the point and get things done, to favor goals and efficiency over moment-by-moment distinction.

When you travel you experience, in a very practical way, the act of rebirth. You confront completely new situations, the day passes more slowly, and on most journeys you don’t even understand the language the people speak.. You begin to be more accessible to others, because they may be able to help you in difficult situations. – Paulo Coelho

Did you think you should enter the Garden of Bliss without such trials as came to those who passed before you? – The Koran

• In other words, tourist attractions are defined by their collective popularity, and that very popularity tends to devalue the individual experience of such attractions.

The practice of soulful travel is to discover the overlapping point between history and everyday life, the way to find the essence of every place, every day: In the markets, small chapels, out-of-the-way parks, craft shops. Curiosity about the extraordinary in the ordinary moves the heart of the traveler intent on seeing behind the veil of tourism. – Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage

Bear in mind that the special advantage of vagabonding is the experience not really knowing what happens next, which you can obtain at bargain rates in all cases… The challenges you face offer no alternative but to cope them. And doing that , your life is being lived fully. – Ed Buryn, Vagabonding in Europe and North America

We see as we are. – The Buddha

Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own countrymen, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untraveled minds. – Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon

We do not need to understand other people and their customs fully to interact with them and learn in the process; it is making the effort to interact without knowing all the rules, improvising certain situations, that allow us to grow. – Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazards, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment no matter what. – George Santayana, The Philosophy of Travel

Exploration is not so much a covering surface distance as a study in depth: a fleeting episode, a fragment of landscape or a remark overheard that may provide the only means of understanding and interpreting areas which would otherwise remain barren of meaning. – Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

• The secret of adventure is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you.
  • To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habit of home and open yourself up to unpredictability.

Explore your own higher latitude. Be a Columbus to whole new continents within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

The man who is truly good and wise will bear with dinginity whatever fortune sends, and will always make the best of his circumstances. – Aristotle

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them… How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquesioningly. Everything … we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is golden for him who has the vision to realize it as such. – Henry Miller

Our eyes find it easier on a given occasion to produce a picture already often produced, than to seize upon the divergence and novelty of an impression. It is difficult and painful for the ear to listen to anything new; we hear strange music badly. – Friedrich Nietzsche

Traveler vs. Tourist

The traveler sees what he sees; the tourist sees what he has come to see. – GK Chesterton

The traveler was active, he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. – Daniel Boorstin

Tourists don’t know where they’ve been; travelers don’t know where they’re going. – Paul Theroux

Travelers are those who leave their assumptions at home, and [tourists are] those who don’t. – Pico Iyer

• With escape in mind, vacationers tend to approach their holiday with a grim resolve, determined to make their experience live up to their expectation; on the vagabonding road, you prepare for the long haul knowing that the predictable and the unpredictable, the pleasant and the unpleasant are not separate but part of the same ongoing reality.
• In this way, “seeing” as you travel is somewhat of a spiritual exercise: a process not of seeking interesting surroundings, but of being continually interested in whatever surrounds you.

Most people are on the world, not in it – having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them – undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate. – John Muir, The Wilderness World of John Muir

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. – Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

• The best way to confront reality is not with a set method of interpretation but with a sincere attitude of open-mindedness.

Luxury, then, is a way of being ignorant, comfortably. – Leroi Jones, Political Poem

• Cling too fiercely to your ideologies and you’ll miss the subtle realities that politics can’t address.
• Just as skepticism should not be confused with cynicism, however, embracing realism need not be confused with falling into pessimism.

The evaluation of tourism cannot be accomplished against a static background. Some of what we see as destruction is construction. Some is the result of a lack of any other viable option; and some the result of choices that could be made differently. – Davydd J. Greenwood

• One particular potent strain of traveler pessimism is the notion that modern influences are destroying native societies, or that certain cultures were more “real” sometimes in the not-too-distant past. According to this assumption, any given society was somehow better twenty years ago, before it was “spoiled.” What such reflexive pessimism overlooks, of course, is that societies have always changed, and that “tradition” is a dynamic phenomenon.
  • … much of concern about the evils of change within premodern culture is less an interest in the quality of local life than our own desire to experience an “untainted” culture.
  • The purest way to see a culture is simply to accept and experience it as it is now.

While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment… A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveler, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see. – Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

The unreal never is: the Real never is not. This truth indeed has been seen by those who can see the true. – Bhagavad Gita

The drug vision remain a sort of dream that cannot be brought over into daily life. Old mist may be banished, that is true, but the alien chemical agent forms another mist, maintaining the separation of the ‘I” from the true experience of the ‘One.’ – Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

• The problem with marijuana, however, is that it’s the travel equivalent of watching television: It replaces real sensation with artificially enhanced ones. Because it doesn’t force you to work for a feeling, it creates passive experiences that are only vaguely connected to the rest of your life.

I never took drugs because I am drugs. – Salvador Dali

• Strive to be drugs as you travel, to patiently embrace the raw, personal sensation of unmediated reality – an experience far more affecting than any intoxicant can promise.

Often I feel I got to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am… Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating. – Michael Crichton, Travels

We all have stuck in us deep somewhere a keenness for excitement, a savoring for the kooky, a leap-for-life outlook. From this comes the catalytic impetus, without which all other requirements mean nothing. Everyday types are as likely to have this sine qua non as the obvious icon-kickers. The person who strikes off for himself is no hero, nor necessarily even unconventional, but to a greater degree than most people, he or she thinks and acts independently. The vagabond frees in himself the latent urge to live closer to the edge of experience. – Ed Buryn

• …what most people consider “paradise” is defined in contrast to the stresses of home.
• In knowing my possibilities, I also knew my limitations.
• Aboriginal walkabout – walkabout acts as a kind of remedy when the duties and obligations of life cause one to lose track of his or her true self. To correct this, one merely leaves behind all possessions and starts walking.
  • There is no physical goal: It simply continues until one becomes whole again.

One must not delude oneself that we are all alike or destined to be members of some sort of global family. – Jeffrey Taylor, Ex-Peace Corps worker

• Acknowledging differences and avoiding superficial cures is not just a valuable lesson of volunteer work – it’s often the first step in actually solving the problems that you seek to fix.

He who stays at home beside his hearth and is content with the information which he may acquire concerning his own region, cannot be on the same level as one who divides his life span between different lands and spends his days journeying in search of precious and original knowledge. – al-Masudi, The Meadows of Gold

People say that we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we are seeking is an experience of being alive. – Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

[Travel as a form of asceticism] is a way of surrendering to reduced circumstances in a manner that enhances the whole person. It is a radical way of knowing exactly who, what, and where you are, in defiance of those powerful forces in society that aim to make us forget. – Kathleen Norris

• Travel compels you to discover your spiritual side by simply elimination: Without all the rituals, routines, and possessions that give your life meaning at home, you are forced to look for meaning within yourself.
• Words are symbols, and symbols never resonate the same for everyone.

There is no God but reality. – Sufi saying

• …it is not a declaration of unbelief. Rather, it is a warning to avoid turning inspiration into fetish and tradition into dogma; it is an admonition to never reduce the spiritual realm to the narrow borders of your own perceptions, prejudices, and ideals.

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. – Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

http://www.vagabonding.net/resources/

Aleph by Paolo Coelho

Thou knowest all – I cannot see.
I trust I shall not live in vain,
I know that we shall meet again
In some divine eternity.
– Oscar Wilde, “The True Knowledge”

• I’ve been trying all my life to find out what my limits are and have never reached them yet. But then my universe doesn’t really help, it keeps expanding and won’t allow me to know it entirely.
• That’s because, like everyone else on the planet, you believe that time would teach you to grow closer to God. But time doesn’t teach; it merely brings us a sense of weariness and of growing older.
• It isn’t what you did in the past that will affect the present. It’s what you do in the present that will redeem the past and thereby change the future.
• Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage.
• After weeks on the road, listening to a language you don’t understand, using a currency whose value you don’t comprehend, walking down streets you’ve never walked down before, you discover that your old “I”, along with everything you ever learned, is absolutely no use at all in the face of those new challenges, and you begin to realize that, buried deep in your unconscious mind, there is someone much more interesting and adventurous and more open to the world and to new experiences.
• God will guide you, because everything you ever experienced or will experience is in the here and now. The world is being created and destroyed in this very moment. Whoever you met will reappear, whoever you lost will return. Don’t betrayed the grace that was bestowed on you. Understand what is going on inside you and you will understand what is going on inside everyone else.
• … with familiarity came habit.
• Tragedy always brings about radical change in our lives, a change that is associated with the same principle: loss. When faced by any loss, there’s no point in trying to recover what has been, it’s best to take advantage of the large space that opens up before us and fill it with something new.
  • In theory, every loss is for our good; in practice, though, that is when we question the existence of God and ask ourselves, “What did I do to deserve this?”
• Anyone truly committed to life never stops walking.
• … we always try to interpret things in accordance with what we want and not as they are.
• Courage can attract fear and adulation, but willpower requires patience and commitment. Men and women with immense willpower are generally solitary types and give off a kind of coolness.
• No life is complete without a touch of madness.
• A life without cause is a life without effect.
• Words are tears that have been written down. Tears are words that need to be shed. Without them, joy loses all its brilliance and sadness has no end. Thank you, then, for your tears.

No one is a prophet in his own land. – Brazilian saying

• We always tend to value what comes from afar, never recognizing the beauty around us.
• A forest of a hundred thousand trees, no two leaves are alike. And no two journeys along the same Path are alike. If we continue to travel together, trying to make things fit our world-view, neither of us will benefit.
• If we seek something, that same thing is seeking us.

What can’t be cured must be endured. – Portuguese Proverb

• To live is to experience things, not sit around pondering the meaning of life.
• Don’t think about what you’ll tell people afterwards. The time is here and now. Make the most of it.

Place all your feelings outside of yourself and you will be renewed. – Laozi

• … but I knew then that we were like the clouds that fill the sky so that you can no longer tell where one ends and another begins… We had children, we honored God and family, then, one day, a wind came and parted the clouds.
• Don’t be intimidated by other people’s opinions. Only mediocrity is sure of itself, so take risks and do what you really want to do.
• Anyone who knows God cannot describe him. Anyone who can describe God does not know him.
• Why have I been complaining all these months about not being in touch with the Divine Energy? What nonsense! We are always in touch with it, it’s only routine that prevents us from feeling it.
• Times neither moves nor is it stationary. Time changes.
  • We occupy one point in that constantly mutating time – our Aleph.
• Never. We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us, they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms. For example, I can’t see who is in the next carriage, but it contains people traveling in the same time as me, as you, as everyone. The fact that we can’t speak to them or know what’s going on in that other carriage is completely irrelevant. They are there. So what we call “life” is a train with many carriages. Sometimes we are in one, sometimes we are in another, and sometimes we cross between them, when we dream or allow ourselves to be swept away by the extraordinary.
• “Why are there so many conflicts then?” “So that the world can evolve, so that the body can change. It’s nothing personal.”
• If you don’t get up early, you’ll never see the sun rise. If you don’t pray, God may be near, but you won’t feel His presence.

The Path to Peace flows like a river and because it resists nothing, it has won even before it has begun. The art of peace is unbeatable because no one is fighting against anyone, only themselves. If you conquer yourself, then you will conquer the world. - Morihei Ueshiba

First develop a strategy that utilizes everything around you. The best way to prepare for a challenge is to cultivate the ability to call upon an infinite variety of responses.

• “Where have you been?” is not an empty question. Anyone asking it is also saying “I missed you”, “I want to be with you”, “I need to know what you’ve been up to”.
• There is always an element of ‘beginner’s luck’, conceived by God simply to show that it’s possible, but after that, the situation goes into reverse and returns to what it was before.
• Non-resistance: Good fighters use their opponent’s energy and turn it back on them. So the more I waste my energy on words, the less convinced I will be of what I’m saying, and the easier it will be to get the better of me.
• All I need at the moment is for you to embrace me, a gesture as old as humanity itself, and which means far more than the meeting of two bodies. An embrace means I don’t feel threatened by you, I’m not afraid to be this close, I can relax, feel at home, feel protected and in the presence of someone who understands me. It is said that each time we embrace someone warmly, we gain an extra day of life. So please, embrace me now.
• The motto of the alchemists was Solve et coagula, which means “separate and bring together”.
• The trouble with words is that they give us the illusory sense that we are making ourselves understood as well as understanding what others are saying. However, when we turn around and come face to face with our destiny, we discover that words are not enough.
  • A warrior in search of his dream must take his inspiration from what he actually does and not from what he imagines himself doing.
• Knowing how to appreciate and honor our opponents is a far cry from what flatters, wimps or traitors do.
• I love you because all the loves in the world are like different rivers flowing into the same lake, where they meet and are transformed into a single love that becomes rain and blesses the earth.
• I love you like a river which understands that it must learn to flow differently over waterfalls and to rest in the shallows. I love you because we are all born in the same place, at the same source, which keeps us provided with a constant supply of water. And so, when we feel weak, all we have to do is wait a little. The spring returns, the winter snows melt and fill us with new energy.
  • I love you like a river that begins as a solitary trickle in the mountains and gradually grows and joins other rivers until, after a certain point, it can flow around any obstacles in order to get where it wants.
  • I receive your love and I give you mine. Not the love of a man for a woman, not the love of a father for a child, not the love of God for his creatures, but a love with no name and no explanation, like a river that cannot explain why it follows a particular course, but simply onwards. A love that asks for nothing and gives nothing in return; it is simply there.
• … for both sexes possess the gift that will allow them to enter into contact with the unknown, as long as they are open to their ‘feminine side.’
• Is it possible to deviate from the path God has made? Yes, but it’s always a mistake. It is possible to avoid pain? Yes, but you’ll never learn anything. Is it possible to know something without ever having experienced it? Yes, but it will never truly be part of you.
• Sometimes you have to travel a long way in order to find what is near. When the rain returns to earth, it brings with it the things of the air.
  • The magical and the extraordinary are with me and with everyone in the Universe all the time, but sometimes we forget that and need to be reminded…

Loving Prayer from Aleph by Paolo Coelho

I will be capable of loving, regardless of whether I am loved in return,
Of giving, even when I have nothing,
Of working happily, even in the midst of difficulties,
Of holding out my hand, even when utterly alone and abandoned,
Of drying my tears, even while I weep,
Of believing, even when no one believes in me.

For One More Day by Mitch Albom

• Of course, when you’re young, you nest in your parents’ plan, not your own.
• A child embarrassed by his mother is just a child who hasn’t lived long enough.
• There are many things in my life that I wish I could take back. Many moments I would recast.
• A child should never have to choose.
• …isolated early childhood memory…
• You need to keep people close. You need to give them access to your heart.

Inspirations by Paulo Coelho

• [Jorge Luis] Borges starts his talk by saying how the ancients did not revere the book – the written word – as we do. Rather, they saw in the written words a sort of imprisonment of the spirit, of oral teachings. Indeed, to write a message down transforms it: it becomes visible, palpable and no longer dwells in the space between the speaker and the listener. The message becomes “heavier,” acquires a body of ink and paper (or clay in ancient times) and is supposed to live longer than the person who first spoke it.
  • It becomes clear that the written words enables us to remember, but at the same time it perpetuates this loss of memory – we no longer need to make the effort of remembering since it’s written down.
  • … some of these texts, such as the Rig Veda or the Dead Sea Scrolls, are not attributable to a specific single writer, but to this common furnace of imagination that lights humanity.
• Let’s be honest – throughout a lifetime we amass a quantity of stories and information that only our forgetfulness puts into shape.

The Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Andersen

• He was much too happy, but not least bit proud, because a good heart is never proud.

The Prince by Nicollo Machiavelli

• So, as a prince is forced to know how to act like a beast, he must learn from the fox and the lion; because a lion is defenseless against traps and a fox is defenseless against wolves. Therefore one must be a fox in order to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves. Those who simply act like lions are stupid. So it follows that a prudent ruler cannot, and must not, honor his words when it places him at a disadvantage and when the reason for which he made his promise no longer exist.
• Men are so simple, and so much creatures of circumstance, that the deceiver will always find someone ready to be deceived.

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde

• The aim of love is to love: no more, and no less.
• Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. Some day people will realize what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do.

The Desert Fathers

• The nature of water is soft, the nature of stone is hard; but if a bottle is hung above a stone letting water drip down, it wears away the stone. It is like that with the word of God; it is soft and our heart is hard, but if a man hears the word of God often, it will break open his heart to the fear of God.
• A brother asked Poemen about the words, “Do not render evil for evil” (I Thess. 5:15). He said to him, “The passion work in four stages, first in the heart, then in the face, third in words, fourth in deeds – and it is in deeds that it is essential not to render evil for evil. If you purify your heart, passion will not show in your expression, but if it does, take care not to speak about it; if you do speak, cut the conversation short in case you render evil for evil.”

The Bhagavad Gita

• When the light of wisdom shines from the portals of the body’s dwelling, then we know that Sattva is in power.
• Greed, busy activity, many undertakings, unrest, the lust of desire – these arise when Rajas increase.
• Darkness, inertia, negligence, delusion – these appear when Tamas prevail.
• [How is the man known who has gone beyond the three powers of nature? What is his path; and how does he transcend the three?] He who hates not light, nor busy activity, nor even darkness, when they are near, neither longs for them when they are far; Who unperturbed by changing conditions sits apart and watches and says ‘the powers of nature go round’, and remains firm and shakes not; Who dwells in his inner self, and is the same in pleasure and pain; to whom gold or stones or earth are one, and what is pleasing or displeasing leave him in peace; who is beyond both praise and blame, and whose mind is steady and quiet; Who is the same in honor or disgrace, and has the same love for enemies or friends, who surrenders all selfish undertakings – this man has gone beyond the three. And he who with never-failing love adores me and works for me, he passes beyond the three powers and can be one with Brahman, the ONE. For I am the abode of Brahman, the never-failing fountain of everlasting life. The law of righteousness is my law; and my joy is infinite joy.

Venus in Furs by Leopold Sacher-Masoch

• ‘Is there any greater cruelty for the lover than the beloved woman’s infidelity?’ ‘Ah,’ she countered, ‘we are faithful as long as we love, but you men demand that women be faithful without love and give ourselves without joy. Who is the cruel one here? The woman or the man? On the whole, you northerners take love too earnestly, too seriously. You talk about duties, when all that should count is pleasure.’

Spiritual Verses by Rumi

• This fiery lust does not abate with practice, but only by abstaining does it lesson. So long as you lay firewood on a fire, how will the fire die down by stoking it?
• And know the faithful from the hateful ones; seek out companions of the truth and join them! Each person shows a liking for their own, a fool alone then thinks he’s done good deeds.

Zen Stories: the Staff and Shout of the Venerable Ones

What is Zen?

不立文学，教外别传，直指人心，见性成佛。

• Not reliant on written word
• A special transmission separate from the scriptures
• Direct pointing at one’s mind, seeing one’s nature, becoming the Buddha

Fish forget that they live in lakes and rivers; people forget that they live in the magic of the Dao. – Confucius

• If one engages in self-cultivation with the desire to sever the roots of defilement and erroneous thinking, it is not only to attain the tranquil realm of true emptiness which involves no-thought, no-idea, no-mind, no-self, etc.; it is also in pursuit of the wonderful wisdom that is experienced in and grows from a way of life that is different from the ordinary. In that realm, the whole world is seen from one perspective, and there are no dichotomies; it is the true world where the self and others, as well as good and evil, are all transcended.

Stories

• Don’t get mired in the worlds of yesterday and tomorrow. Instead, live in the world of today. Wherever you are and whatever you are doing, experience the beautiful things around you at that moment.
  • Life is but a breath.
  • When you can see the beauty and goodness in everything around you, you have entered the gates of Zen.
• Heaven and Hell aren’t places that suddenly appear after death. They exist here and now. Good and evil involve just a single instant of thought, and the gates of Heaven and Hell are ready to open for you at any time.
• When you go point out other people’s mistakes, the real error may very well be hidden in your own misconceptions.
• The truth and words are unrelated.
  • The truth can be compared to the moon. And words can be compared to a finger. I can use my finger to point out the moon, but my finger is not the moon, and you don’t need my finger to see the moon.
  • Language is merely a tool for pointing out the truth, a mean to help us attain enlightenment. Whoever insists on language sacrifices the truth and will be confused forever.
  • Anytime we use words to explain something, there will be deficiencies. That which is asked about is itself the most complete answer.
  • If a rock is thrown at a dog, the dog will go after the rock. If a rock is thrown at a lion, the lion will go after the person who threw it. When investigating the language of Zen, you should be like lion and not the dog.
    • The words of a person of Zen are just pointers, topics that lead to a deeper level of experience, so when encountering the language of Zen, don’t pursue simply the meanings of the words themselves.
• If you had one hundred sheep and one of them lost its way, wouldn’t you immediately go in search of the lost one, abandoning the other 99 in the open fields? It is important to help those who need help the most.
• In practicing Zen, we should be like the mute, gaining insights yet feeling it not worthwhile to discuss them with others. The worst thing a person can do is emulate a parrot and go around teaching others about one’s merely superficial understanding of Zen.
• Don’t project  yourself on things you come into contact with, and don’t differentiate between yourself and other things, because so-called  subjectivity and objectivity do not exist. The domain of wisdom is in understanding that there is no self, there is no other, and everything is the way it is.
• Consistency between actions and words is the foundation of self-cultivation.
• Heaven looks on all beings just the same and won’t help anyone in particular. The one who can help you is yourself.
• Everything has its place in nature.
• Don’t dwell on the past. Don’t worry about the future. Experience and cherish the moment. Happiness is acting according to circumstances, whatever they may be.
• While we live, we should enjoy the mystery and beauty that are life, rather than worrying about what comes after death. Live today without worrying about tomorrow, for tomorrow will have its own worries.
• When the wind blows, the bamboo bends; when the wind is gone, the bamboo makes no sound. A wild goose crosses a wintry lake, and when it departs, the lake leaves no trace. When something happens, confront it with your original nature. When it’s over, empty your mind of it.
• All you have to do is respond in a direct, resolute way to any situation, and you will become that situation, and that situation become you.
• The perfect person’s mind is like a mirror: neither taking nor welcoming, it responds but doesn’t store. So, when it is time to be a general, you should be a general, and when it is time to be a monk, be a monk.
• If your mind is torn by two conflicting desires, the contradiction will destroy your mind’s unity and tranquility. Just remember, when you should grab something, grab it; when you should let go, let go.
• Rich and poor are not functions of how much money we have, but rather, of whether or not we are content with what we have.
• Meet the changes by not changing, for the number of ways to change is limited, while the number of ways to stay the same is infinite.
• The same pat answer isn’t necessarily true in all situations. The truth of life is always moving, always changing.
• It is not until the external light is extinguished that our internal light shines bright. It is not until our crutch is discarded that we can realize our latent potential.
• …we can attain this new life not through thought, but through direct insight.
• The most precious thing there is resides inside you – it is yourself. In pursuing external objects, we lose the self.

The many have one essence, and the one has many manifestations.

• What other people have come to understand intuitively can never become yours unless you come to understand it through your own effort.
• 僧问：“祖意教意是同是别？” 师曰：“鸡寒上树，鸭寒入水。”
  • Everyone has a different way of arriving at the same destination.
  • There is not just one path, and not everyone is fit to travel the same path. By limiting yourself to a certain path, you may actually lead yourself astray.
• Socrates said that if people know what they should do, they will do it. But he underestimated people’s ability to fail themselves. Everyone knows what they should do, but how many people actually do it?
• Someone asked a Zen Master, “How do you practice Zen?” The master said, “When you are hungry, eat; when you are tired, sleep.” “Isn’t that what everyone does anyway?” The master replied, “No, No. Most people entertain a thousand desires when they eat and scheme over a thousand plans (untie a thousand knots) when they sleep.”
• Any time and any place are always the best time and the best place. All you have to do is experience things with an attentive mind.
  • Seize the moment; experience the present; don’t let anything slip by.
• No teacher can instill a student with anything; but he can help that student understand everything in the student’s own mind.
• Everything in the world is different from everything else. Therefore, there can never be one certain, unfailing standard. Standards change with people.
• Movement was originally easy, but we have been shackled by so many worldly rules and restrictions that it is sometimes difficult to take even a single step.
• A man of Dao is of no-mind; how can he do wrong? By not getting mired in appearances and by following our original nature, we can do no wrong.
• Only by assimilating yourself with nature and sincerely forgetting the self can you be one with the truth.
• Flowers are quick to wither, yet the cycle will always remain. Water may move, but the surface of the stream will never change. The meaning of life lies in the process of living – change is the only thing that never changes.
• You don’t need to travel to some illusory world to find the principles of life; just pay attention to the details of life and experience them. When you begin to doubt, an answer is most likely found where the question begins.
• We often discover a certain joy in hardship after the hardship is over. If we can discover it while it is happening, then summer will have its goodness and winter will have its wonders.
• The world and I live together, the myriad things and I are one.  Although the myriad things have innumerable manifestations, they are really of one body.

Beliefs

Zen teachings do not incorporate any practices of belief within them. In fact, you could not get a religion further from beliefs than Zen. As a meditator, if a belief is encountered within oneself, it is simply to be recognized for what it is – a belief – but not followed. There is no question of pushing beliefs away as terrible things, but neither are they to be justified and shored up to be convictions. Then they come and go within the mind, and one’s life is not based upon them. If one places any importance on beliefs they distort reality and cut off the drive to realize truth within oneself.

Trust, however, is a different thing altogether and very important. It is necessary, for example, to trust in the teachings and the path, otherwise they could not be followed.

• We are all the instruments of nature’s cycle of life and death, whether we like it or not.
  • It is recognized that merely by being alive and breathing, or placing one’s foot upon the ground, one causes countless beings to perish.

There is nothing special about what I do each day;
I only keep myself in harmony with it,
Everywhere I neither accept nor reject anything.
Nor here do I confirm or refute a thing.
Why do people say that red and purple differ?
There’s not a speck of dust on the blue mountain.
Supernatural power and wonder-making works
Are but fetch water and the gathering of wood.

• The more love you give, the more love you get. The more you share good fortune with others, the more you have for yourself.

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

• Morrie’s questions:
  • Tell me something close to your heart.
  • Tell me something about your faith.
  • Have you found someone to share your heart with?
  • Are you at peace with yourself?
• Life is a series of pulls back and forth… A tension of opposite, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.
• The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.
  • [People] gave up days and weeks of their lives, addicted to someone else’s drama.
• The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.

Love is the only rational act. – Stephen Levine

• How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity.
• Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel.
• We’re so wrapped up with egoistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks – we’re involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don’t get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. – Henry Adams

• Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.
  • … learn to actually be more involved in your life while you’re living.

Love each other or perish. – W.H. Auden

• Detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That’s how you are able to leave it.
• I don’t want to leave the world in a state of fright. I want to know what’s happening, accept it, get to a peaceful place, and let go.
• … giving as an adult and taking as a child.
• Aging is not just decay. It’s growth.
  • You have to find what’s good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now. Looking back makes you competitive. And, age is not a competitive issue.
• Envy comes to me, I feel it, and then I let it go.
• Do you know how they brainwash people? They repeat something over and over… More is good. More is good. We repeat it – and it repeated to us – over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what’s really important anymore.
• What really gives you satisfaction is offering others what you have to give.
  • So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
• What we take, we must replenish.
• People are only mean when they’re threatened… and that’s what our culture does. That’s what our economy does.
• I don’t mean you disregard every rule of your community… The little things I can obey. But the big things – how we think, what we value – those you must choose yourself. You can’t let any one – or any society – determine those for you.
• Look, no matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness. We don’t see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become.
• It’s not just other people we need to forgive. We also need to forgive ourselves.
• People act as if death is contagious… It’s not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It’s part of the deal we made.
• Death ends a life, not a relationship.
• There is no formula to relationships. They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like.
• … ignore the lure of advertised values…

Interview: ‘Tuesdays With Morrie,’ Part 1

By the River Piedra I Sat Down & Wept by Paulo Coelho

• Rarely do we realize that we are in the midst of the extraordinary. Miracles occur all around us, signs from God show us the way, angels plead to be heard, but we pay little attention to them because we have been taught that we must follow certain formulas and rules if we want to find God. We do not recognize God is wherever we allow Him/Her to enter.
• Traditional religious practices are important: they allow us to share with others the communal experience of adoration and prayer. But we must never forget that spiritual experience is above all a practical experience of love. And with love, there are no rules. Some may try to control their emotions and develop strategies for their behavior; others may turn to reading  books of advice from “experts” on relationships – but this is all folly. The heart decides, and what it decides is all that really matters.
• True love is an act of total surrender.
  • Those who love conquer the world and have no fear of loss.
• Sooner or later, we have to overcome our fears, because the spiritual path can only be traveled through the daily experience of love.
• One doesn’t love in order to do what is good or to help or to protect someone. If we act that way, we are perceiving the other as a simple object, and we are seeing ourselves as wise and generous persons. This has nothing to do with love. To love is to be in communion with the other and to discover in that other the spark of God.
• … love can only survive when the hope exists that you will be able to win over the person you desire.
• But love is much like a dam: if you allow a tiny crack to form through which only a trickle of water can pass, that trickle will quickly bring down the whole structure, and soon no one will be able to control the force of the current. For when those walls come down, then love takes over, and it no longer matters what is possible or impossible; it doesn’t even matter whether we can keep the loved one at our side. To love is to lose control.
• I’ve paid a considerable price for the little I have gained. I’ve been forced to deny myself many things I’ve wanted, to abandon so many roads that were open to me. I’ve sacrificed my dreams in the name of a larger dream — a peaceful soul. I didn’t want to give up that peace.
• Life takes us by surprise and orders us to move toward the unknown — even when we don’t want to and when we think we don’t need to.
• God is love. But the one who understands this best is the Virgin… The Virgin understands the mystery of total surrender.
  • She was normal. She had already had other children. The Bible tells us that Jesus had two brothers. Virginity, as it relates to Jesus, is based on a different thing: Mary initiated a new generation of grace. A new era began. She is the cosmic bride, Earth, which opens to the heavens and allows itself to be fertilized.
  • Because of the courage She showed in accepting her destiny, She allowed God to come down to earth and She was transformed into the Great Mother… She is the feminine face of God. She has her own divinity.
• The gods throw the dice, and they don’t ask whether we want to be in the game or not. They don’t care if when you go, you leave behind a lover, a home, a career, or a dream. The gods don’t care whether you have it all, whether it seems that your every desire can be met through hard work and persistence. The gods don’t want to know about your plans and your hopes. Somewhere they’re throwing the dice — and you are chosen. From then on, winning or losing is only a question of luck.
  • The gods throw the dice, freeing love from its cage. And love can create or destroy — depending on the direction of the wind when it is set free.
• The universe always helps us fight for our dreams, no matter how foolish they may be. Our dreams are our own, and only we can know the effort required to keep them alive.
• Why is water the symbol of the feminine face of God?
  • She normally chooses that medium to manifest Herself. Maybe because She is the source of life; we are generated in water, and for nine months we live in it. Water is the symbol of the power of woman, the power that no man—no matter how enlightened or perfect he may be—can capture.
• Love doesn’t need to be discussed; it has its own voice and speaks for itself.
• But love is always new. Regardless of whether we love once, twice, or a dozen times in our life, we always face a brand-new situation. Love can consign us to hell or to paradise, but it always takes us somewhere. We simply have to accept it, because it is what nourishes our existence. If we reject it, we die of hunger, because we lack the courage to stretch out a hand and pluck the fruit from the branches of the tree of life. We have to take love where we find it, even if that means hours, days, weeks of disappointment and sadness.
  • The moment we begin to seek love, love begins to seek us… And to save us.
• Truth resides where there is faith.
  • The Buddhists were right, the Hindus were right, the Muslims were right, and so were the Jews. Whenever someone follows the path to faith — sincerely follows it — he or she is able to unite with God and to perform miracles.
• … I am always better than I think and stronger than I believe.

Thy will be done, my Lord. Because you know the weakness in the heart of your children, and you assign each of them only the burden they can bear. May you understand my love — because it is the only thing I have that is really mine, the only thing that I will be able to take with me into the next life. Please allow it to be courageous and pure; please make it capable of surviving the snares of the world.

• Only a man who is happy can create happiness in others.
• You have to be committed to the place you choose. A divided kingdom cannot defend itself from its adversaries. A divided person cannot face life in a dignified way.
• Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering.
• Love doesn’t ask many questions, because if we stop to think we become fearful. It’s an inexplicable fear; it’s difficult even to describe it. Maybe it’s the fear of being scorned, of not being accepted, or of breaking the spell. It’s ridiculous, but that’s the way it is. That’s why you don’t ask — you act. As you’ve said many times, you have to take risks.
• A fall from the third floor hurts as much as a fall from the hundredth.
  • If I have to fall, may it be from a high place.
• That well brought many people here, with their hopes and dreams and conflicts. Someone dared to look for water, water was found, and people gathered where it flowed. I think that when we look for love courageously, it reveals itself, and we wind up attracting even more love. If one person really wants us, everyone does. But if we’re alone, we become even more alone. Life is strange.
  • [I Ching] It says that a city can be moved but not a well. It’s around the well that lovers find each other, satisfy their thirst, build their homes, and raise their children. But if one of them decides to leave, the well cannot go with them. Love remains there, abandoned — even though it is filled with the same pure water as before.
• Because God came to earth to demonstrate His power to us. We are a part of His dream, and He wants His dream to be a happy one. Thus, if we acknowledge that God created us for happiness, then we have to assume that everything that leads to sadness and defeat is our own doing. That’s the reason we always kill God, whether on the cross, by fire, through exile, or simply in our hearts.
• The world itself has a soul, and at a certain moment, that soul acts on everyone and everything at the same time.
• What can I do to try to prevent the suffering of someone who wants to return to paradise before it is time to do so?
• The mountains are beautiful. Anyone who beholds them has to think about the grandness of creation. They are living proof of the love that God feels for us, but their fate is merely to give testimony. They are not like the rivers, which move and transform what is around them.

Give me the opportunity to learn through my love, because love has never kept anyone away from their dreams.

• But the first climber knew what was great about it: the acceptance of the challenge of going forward. He knew that no single day is the same as any other and that each morning brings its own special miracle, its magic moment in which ancient universes are destroyed and new stars are created.
• Every person on earth has a gift. In some, the gift manifests itself spontaneously; others have to work to discover what it is.
  • This gift is there for anyone who will accept it. One has only to believe, accept, and be willing to make mistakes.
  • Accept the gift. And then the gift manifests itself.
• We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation.
  • It’s one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it’s another to think that yours is the only path.
• Life existed before we were born and will continue to exist after we leave this world.
• Love perseveres. It’s men who change.
• Dreams mean work.

Speech in By the River Piedra I Sat Down & Wept

You have to take risks, he said. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

Every day, God gives us the sun — and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy. Every day, we try to pretend that we haven’t perceived that moment, that it doesn’t exist—that today is the same as yesterday and will be the same as tomorrow. But if people really pay attention to their everyday lives, they will discover that magic moment. It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us. But that moment exists—a moment when all the power of the stars becomes a part of us and enables us to perform miracles.

Joy is sometimes a blessing, but it is often a conquest. Our magic moment helps us to change and sends us off in search of our dreams. Yes, we are going to suffer, we will have difficult times, and we will experience many disappointments — but all of this is transitory; it leaves no permanent mark. And one day we will look back with pride and faith at the journey we have taken.

Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won’t suffer the way people do when they havea dream to follow. But when that person looks back — and at some point everyone looks back — she will hear her heart saying, “What have you done with the miracles that God planted in your days? What have you done with the talents God bestowed on you? You buried yourself in a cave because you were fearful of losing those talents. So this is your heritage: the certainty that you wasted your life.”

Pitiful are the people who must realize this. Because when they are finally able to believe in miracles, their life’s magic moments will have already passed them by.

Sometimes an uncontrollable feeling of sadness grips us, he said. We recognize that the magic moment of the day has passed and that we’ve done nothing about it. Life begins to conceal its magic and its art.

We have to listen to the child we once were, the child who still exists inside us. That child understands magic moments. We can stifle its cries, but we cannot silence its voice.

The child we once were is still there. Blessed are the children, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

If we are not reborn — if we cannot learn to look at life with the innocence and the enthusiasm of childhood — it makes no sense to go on living.

There are many ways to commit suicide. Those who try to kill the body violate God’s law. Those who try to kill the soul also violate God’s law, even though their crime is less visible to others.

We have to pay attention to what the child in our heart tells us. We should not be embarrassed by this child. We must not allow this child to be scared because the child is alone and is almost never heard.

We must allow the child to take the reins of our lives. The child knows that each day is different from every other day.

We have to allow it to feel loved again. We must please this child — even if this means that we act in ways we are not used to, in ways that may seem foolish to others.

Remember that human wisdom is madness in the eyes of God. But if we listen to the child who lives in our soul, our eyes will grow bright. If we do not lose contact with that child, we will not lose contact with life.