A series of quotes that I run while folks are coming into a workshop. The quotes provoke conversation among friends and strangers alike... a little informal icebreaker.

1. First thought, best thought.
Zen saying

2. Vision without action is a daydream.
Action without vision is a nightmare.
Japanese proverb

3. Be careful how you interpret the
world: it is like that.
Erich Heller

4. We feel and know that we are
eternal.
Edmund Spenser

5. Teach us delight in
simple things
And mirth that has no
bitter springs.
Rudyard Kipling

6. Meditation is not a difficult task.
It is a way to lead you to
your long-lost home.
Soen Shaku

7. It is better to do the most trifling
thing in the world than to regard half
an hour as a trifle.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

8. To a mind that is still,
the whole universe
surrenders.
Chuang-Tsu

9. One’s real life is often the life that
one does not lead.
Oscar Wilde

10. We are
Like lutes
Once held by God.
Being away from his warm body
Fully explains
This
Constant
Yearning.
Ibrāhīm Hāfiz

11. The way is empty yet use will not
drain it.
Lao-Tsu

12. Learning is a place where paradise
can be created.
bell hooks

13. One touch of nature makes the
whole world kin.
William Shakespeare

14. He who can take no interest in what
is small will take false interest in
what is great.
John Ruskin

15. Things are always changing, so
nothing can be yours.
Shunryu Suzuki

16. A gloss on Descartes:
Sometimes I think
and sometimes I am.
Paul Valery

17. When did the honeysuckle first
sense its own perfume?
When did smoke learn how to fly?
Pablo Neruda

18. The only thing that we can know is
that we know nothing and that is the
highest flight of reason.
Leo Tolstoy

19. Right now a moment of time is
fleeting by. Capture its reality in
paint! To do that we must put all else
out of our minds. We must become
the moment.
Paul Cezanne

20. You will find poetry nowhere unless
you bring some of it with you.
Joseph Jourbet

21. When you get there, there isn’t any
there there.
Gertrude Stein

22. Death, the most dreaded of evils, is
therefore of no concern to us; for
while we exist death is not present,
and when death is present we no
longer exist.
Epicurus

23. They arrive spontaneously, the
principles of all things.
Water need not think
to offer itself as a home
for clear moonlight.
Sōgi

24. The “silly” question is the first
intimation of some totally new
development.
Alfred North Whitehead

25. The meaning of life can be revealed
but never explained.
Kenneth Rexroth

26. If you want to see it, see into it
directly; but when you stop to think
about it , it is altogether missed.
Tao-Wu

27. If the doors of perception were
cleansed everything would appear to
man as it is, infinite.
William Blake

28. Wherever you are is the entry point.
Kabir

29. Man can learn nothing except by
going from the known to the
unknown.
Claude Bernard

30. Art does not reproduce the invisible;
rather it makes it visible.
Paul Klee

31. The world is ruled by letting things
take their course.
Lao-Tsu

32. The moment is the sole reality.
Karl Jaspers

33. We live in a rainbow of chaos.
Paul Cezanne

34. Only when we know little things do
we know anything; doubt grows with
knowledge.
Goethe

35. If you have not lived through
something, it is not true.
Kabir

36. And the end of all our exploring will
be to arrive where we started and
know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot