Satori Quotes:

Satori has no beginning; practice has not end!

- Kodo Sawaki

topic: Practice, Satori, Ends

Each of the small enlightenments that a Zen practitioner has, which are known in Zen as "Satori experiences," provides deeper insights into the nature of existence and helps a person prepare for complete enlightenment.

- Frederick Lenz

topic: Enlightenment, Helping, Satori

I'm not speaking as someone who has reached satori or anything else. I'm a student.

- Sting

topic: Students, Satori

After this happens again and again, we reach a point were there is nothing but satori, which is what nirvikalpa samadhi is like.

- Frederick Lenz

topic: Satori, Samadhi, Introduction

If we achieve satori and the satori shows, like a bit of dogshit stuck to the top of our nose, that is not so good.

- Taisen Deshimaru

topic: Noses, Achieve, Satori

Satori - in the awakening from a dream. Awakening and self-realization and seeing into one's own being - these are synonymous.

- Bruce Lee

topic: Dream, Self, Realization, Satori, Self Realization

Early morning, the orange sun is slowly rising, shining forth in empty luminous clarity. The mind and the sky are one, the sun is rising in the vast space of primordial awareness, and there is just this. Yasutani Roshi once said, speaking of satori, that it was the most precious realization in the world, because all the great philosophers had tried to understand ultimate reality but had failed to do so, yet with satori or awakening all of your deepest questions are finally answered: it's just this.

- Ken Wilber

topic: Morning, Reality, Sky, Satori, Ultimate Reality

Underlying great doubt there is great satori, where there is thorough questioning there will be thoroughgoing experience of awakening.

- Hakuin Ekaku

topic: Doubt, Awakening, Thorough, Satori

I want to take you to a place of pure magic... It's the place athletes call the "zone". Buddhists call "satori" and ravers call "trance". I call it the Silver Desert. It's a place of pure light that holds the dark within it. It's a place of pure rhythm.

- Gabrielle Roth

topic: Buddhist, Athlete, Dark, Trance, Satori

Satori is a brief flash. Suddenly the light breaks through. For a short timeless time we experience eternity in its unmanifest form. It's comparable to salvikalpa samadhi.

- Frederick Lenz

topic: Light, Break Through, Eternity, Satori

To be aflame with silence, with joy, is wisdom. It is not through logic but through love. It is not through words but through a wordless state called meditation or a state of no-mind, satori, samadhi.

- Rajneesh

topic: Silence, Meditation, Joy, Satori

You can call it tathata, suchness. 'Suchness' is a Buddhist way of expressing that there is something in you which always remains in its intrinsic nature, never changing. It always remains in its selfsame essence, eternally so. That is your real nature. That which changes is not you, that is mind. That which does not change in you is buddha-mind. You can call it no-mind, you can call it samadhi, satori. It depends upon you; you can give it whatsoever name you want. You can call it christ-consciousness.

- Rajneesh

topic: Buddhist, Real, Essence, Satori, Christ Consciousness

Life is full of tough decisions, and nothing makes them easy. But the worst ones are really your personal koans, and tormenting ambivalence is just the sense of satori rising. Try, trust, try, and trust again, and eventually you'll feel your mind change its focus to a new level of understanding.

- Martha Beck

topic: Focus, Decision, Understanding, Ambivalence, Satori

Essentially Satori is a sudden experience, and it is often described as a "turning over" of the mind, just as a pair of scales will suddenly turn over when a sufficient amount of material has been poured into one pan to overbalance the weight in the other. Hence it is an experience which generally occurs after a long and concentrated effort to discover the meaning of Zen.

- Alan Watts

topic: Long, Effort, Mind, Satori

If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.

- Sarah Vowell

topic: Spring, Reading, Writing, Satori, Blurry

Zen is the way of complete self-realization; a living human being who follows the way of Zen can attain satori and then live a new life as a Buddha.

- Zenkei Shibayama

source: Zenkei Shibayama (2012). “A Flower Does Not Talk: Zen Essays”, p.19, Tuttle Publishing

topic: Self, New Life, Realization, Satori

All that the posture of skepticism accomplishes is to freeze the ego in an ignorantist poverty that never stretches or diversifies its resources of imagination or understanding. Any uncultured cretin can close his eyes and try to reduce the issues down to linear simplisms and say, "I am doubting, I am proving my magisterial or sovereign control over my own mind." Doubt is a useful and significant test of one's critical powers, but by itself it bears little if any significant cultural charge of enlightenment or satori; indeed it is the very opposite kind of thing.

- Kenny Smith

topic: Eye, Opposites, Issues, Satori