I want to emphasize that when that idea came, there was no preparation for it. It arrived out of my own circumstances, rather than out of a deliberate desire on my part to sit down and write. I wasn’t being separate from what I was doing; this was arising out of what I was doing.

“Write about what you know. If you write about what you know, and know personally, and know deeply, and know better than anyone else, that’s going to be plenty exotic to everybody else.”

Zen is, of course, a continuation of the old dhyana yoga, in which one just sits silently and allows one’s thoughts to go away by their own dead weight.

The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

The best way of investigating Quality that I know of is the brilliant Oriental technique of zazen, which defines Dynamic Quality very precisely by forcing a subtraction of static intellectual patterns for it rather than adding new ones.

The ultimate goal in the pursuit of excellence is enlightenment. After that there are no goals, for one realizes emotionally as well as intellectually that all experience is of equal quality.

I think that our traditional Western way is to try to capture life in a net of words. But I think one can realize that the net of words is a part of life. The danger is not in using the words; the danger is in clinging to them, clinging to their meaning, and saying, “Oh, now I have spoken a great truth.”

At the instant quality is observed, observer and observed are not separate. Thought of the sort used in definitions uses symbols of past experience to account for new experience. Quality is the experience before it is symbolized. A discipline of quality is learned when one succeeds in a pure response to one’s instantaneous situation uncluttered by

This problem of trying to describe value in terms of substance has been the problem of a smaller container trying to contain a larger one. Value is not a subspecies of substance. Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: Substance is a “stable pattern