Will

“Handle even a single leaf of a green in such a way that it manifests the body of the Buddha. This in turn allows the Buddha to manifests through the leaf. This is a power which you cannot grasp with your rational mind. It operates freely, according to the situation, in a most natural way.”
― Dōgen, How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment

“Our own picture of the world is a kind of a fantasy made of our memory in our brain. Each person has this limitation. That is why we have problems, troubles, fighting, arguments. The angles we see the world from are different, and anuttara samyak sambodhi, the supreme awareness, is to see that we cannot see the whole world, to understand that we are deluded and limited. This means we have to let go of our viewpoints.”
― Dōgen, The Wholehearted Way: A Translation of Eihei Dogen's Bendowa, With Commentary by Kosho Uchiyama Roshi

“The contemplative way is, in fact, not a way. Christ alone is the way, and he is invisible. The 'desert' of contemplation is simply a metaphor to explain the state of emptiness which we experience when we have left all ways, forgotten ourselves and taken the invisible Christ as our way.”
― Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer

“If you are striving to be perfect and pure, everything depends on getting the right idea of what absolute purity and perfection mean. We tend to get trapped in the idea of a static perfection that leads to rigid perfectionism. Abstract speculation can create an image of God that is foreign to the human heart. On the level of religious doctrine, it's a God that is totally purged of anything that we call dark. Then we try to live up to the standards of a God that is purely light and we can't handle the darkness within us. And because we can't handle it, we suppress it. But the more we suppress it, the more it leads its own life, because it's not integrated. Before we know it, we are in serious trouble.”
― Brother David Steindl-Rast