Explore Quotes by D.T. Suzuki

That's why I love philosophy: no one wins.

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.

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

When mountain-climbing is made too easy, the spiritual effect the mountain exercises vanishes into the air.

Art always has something of the unconscious about it.

Fundamentally the marksman aims at himself.

We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way.

When traveling is made too easy and comfortable, its spiritual meaning is lost. This may be called sentimentalism, but a certain sense of loneliness engendered by traveling leads one to reflect upon the meaning of life, for life is after all a travelling from one unknown to another unknown.

I am an artist at living - my work of art is my life.

You ought to know how to rise above the trivialities of life, in which most people are found drowning themselves.

Eternity is the Absolute present.

Zen in it's essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one's being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom.

Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?

Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.

Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.

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.