The Dharma Bums Quotes
"Practice charity without holding in mind any conceptions about charity, for charity after all is just a word."
"All those Zen Masters throwing young kids in the mud because they can’t answer their silly word questions."
"The absence of active lust in me had also given me a new peaceful life that I was enjoying a great deal."
"All you want to do is run out there and get laid and get beat up and get screwed up and get old and sick and banged around by samsara."
"I realized she wanted to be a big Buddhist like Japhy and being a girl the only way she could express it was this way."
"Colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity."
"All these people, they all got white-tiled toilets and take big dirty craps like bears in the mountains, but it’s all washed away to convenient supervised sewers and nobody thinks of crap any more or realizes that their origin is shit and civet and scum of the sea."
"You can carry that ax, Morley, but I don’t think we’ll need it, but canned goods is just a lot of water you have to hig on your back, don’t you realize we got all the water we want waitin for us up there?"
"Well I just thought a can of this Chinese chop suey would be kinda tasty."
"I dunno, maybe I am, but if I am I’ll leave a lovely will anyway."
"The world ain’t so bad, when you got Japhies, I thought, and felt glad."
"Comparisons are odious, Smith," he sent sailing back to me, quoting Cervantes and making a Zen Buddhist observation to boot. "It don’t make a damn frigging difference whether you’re in The Place or hiking up Matterhorn, it’s all the same old void, boy."
"Rocks are space," I thought, "and space is illusion."
"Yeah man, you know to me a mountain is a Buddha. Think of the patience, hundreds of thousands of years just sittin there bein perfectly perfectly silent and like praying for all living creatures in that silence and just waitin for us to stop all our frettin and foolin."
"I prayed for the safety and in fact the eternal happiness of poor Morley."
"The earth is a fresh planet, why worry about anything?"
"You know, the Zen Lunatics have long joined dust, laughter on their dust lips."
"To be in some riverbottom somewhere, or in a desert, or in mountains, or in some hut in Mexico or shack in Adirondack, and rest and be kind, and do nothing else, practice what the Chinese call 'do-nothing.'"
"I wanted to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures."
"For a while I went on a little walk by myself, out by the shallow iced creek, and sat meditating against a stump of dirt and the huge mountain walls on both sides of our valley were silent masses."
"What a strange thing is man ... like in the Bible it says, Who knoweth the spirit of man that looketh upward?"
"I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ‘em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures."
"Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall."
"What’s the difference the moon’s shining, we can even sleep."
"Fun isn’t everything. You’ve got some responsibilities sometimes, you know."
"Don’t you realize what’s happening?" she yelled staring at me with big wide sincere eyes trying by crazy telepathy to make me believe that what she was saying was absolutely true.
"It’s nothing but bullshit!" I yelled and suddenly I had the feeling I always got when I tried to explain the Dharma to people.
"Why don’t you listen to me?" I kept pleading, but each time I said that, she hypnotized me with her staring eyes and almost had me for a while believing in what she believed from the sheer weight of her complete dedication to the discriminations her mind was making.
"But you’re getting these silly convictions and conceptions out of nowhere, don’t you realize all this life is just a dream? Why don’t you just relax and enjoy God? God is you, you fool!"
"Have some wine, put some wisdom in your head."
"And that’s what I said to myself, 'I am now on the road to Heaven.' Suddenly it became clear to me that there was a lot of teaching for me to do in my lifetime."
"One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls."
"Everything is all right forever and forever and forever."
"Everything’s gone, already gone, already come and gone."
"Sometimes in the woods I’d just sit and stare at things themselves, trying to divine the secret of existence anyway."
"What did I care about the squawk of the little very self which wanders everywhere? I was dealing in outblownness, cut-off-ness, snipped, blownoutness, putoutness, turned-off-ness, nothing-happens-ness, gone-ness, gone-out-ness, the snapped link, nir, link, vana, snap!"
"The warm wind made the pines talk deep one night when I began to experience what is called 'Samapatti,' which in Sanskrit means Transcendental Visits."
"Everybody in the family heard of my vision and what I did but they didn’t seem to think much of it: in fact I didn’t, either. And that was right."
"Don’t let the blues make you bad," sings Frank Sinatra.
"The Buddha was about to start expounding a sutra and twelve hundred and fifty bhikkus were waiting with their garments arranged and their feet crossed, and all the Buddha did was raise a flower."
"The silence is so intense that you can hear your own blood roar in your ears but louder than that by far is the mysterious roar which I always identify with the roaring of the diamond of wisdom, the mysterious roar of silence itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you’ve seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth."
"The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is."
"Everybody wanted to have a good time and tried real hard but we all woke up the next day feeling sorta sad and separate."
"The only thing wrong with that monastery shot in Japan for me, is, though for all their intelligence and good intentions, the Americans out there, they have so little real sense of America and who the people are who really dig Buddhism here, and they don’t have any use for poetry."
"What hope, what human energy, what truly American optimism was packed in that neat little frame of his!"
"Bad karma automatically produces good karma."
"The stars were the same then as they are tonight."
"Just think, Ray, what it was like right here on this hill where our shack stands thirty thousand years ago in the time of the Neanderthal man."
"No he won’t," I said, "he loves us too much."
"The only thing was to go to bed and stick my head under the down."
"Are we fallen angels who didn’t want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?"
"I didn’t know anything any more, I didn’t care, and it didn’t matter, and suddenly I felt really free."
"To the children and the innocent it’s all the same."
"God, I love you" and looked up to the sky and really meant it. "I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other."