Lao Tzu Quotes

For the Christian tradition, the heart’s true home is a life rooted in the love of God. Like Lao-tzu and Dorothy both, Christian wisdom about stability points us toward the true peace that is possible when our spirits are stilled and our feet are planted in a place we know to be holy ground.

If you want a peaceful place to dwell Cold Mountain is guaranteed forever A light wind blows softly in the pines The sound is good when you are close One old man sits beneath the trees Reading Lao Tzu and Huang Ti, mumbling I could not find the world if I searched ten years I’ve forgotten the road by which I came

I have to create a circle of reading for myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament. This is also necessary for all people.

Lao Tzu says: “Accept yourself. Non-acceptance is the root of all the trouble.” None of us accept ourselves. The more a person doesn’t accept himself, the greater a mahatma he looks to others to be. We are our greatest enemy. If we had our way, we would cut ourselves to pieces in order to remove what was unacceptable.

The primary quality that Lao Tzu seems to emobdy is humility, which is the image of water – seeking the common level of existence.

[The Master] doesn’t glitter like a jewel… [but is] as rugged and common as a stone.

Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu’s famous dictum: ‘Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.’ All around me I see something very different, let us say – a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale.

Confucius is like the Torah, rules to follow. And Lao-Tzu is even more conservative, saying that if you do nothing you won’t break any rules. You have to let tradition fall sometime, you have to take action, you have to eat bacon.

Taoism is the way of water. The most frequent element or symbol refered to in Lao Tzu’s wrtings is the symbol of water.

No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao Tzu and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes.

The founders of the great world religions, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Lao-Tzu, Mohammed, all seem to have striven for a worldwide brotherhood of man; but none of them could develop institutions which would include the enemy, the unbeliever.

Not only are we going to shift in our own lives – away from always trying to identify ourselves on the basis of what we have, what we do, and who we are better than, and so on – but shift into more reaching out, more service, more kindness, more living the virtues that Lao Tzu spoke about twenty-five hundred years ago.