The Sweetest Strawberry:
by Zen Koan

The Sweetest Strawberry:
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger.
He fled, the tiger after him.
Coming to a precipice,
he caught hold of the root of a wild vine
and swung himself over the edge.
The tiger sniffed at him from above.
Trembling, the man looked down to where,
far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him.
Only the vine sustained him.
Two mice, one white and one black,
little by little started to gnaw away the vine.
The man then saw a luscious strawberry near him.
Grasping the vine with one hand,
he plucked the strawberry with the other.
How sweet it tasted.
- Zen Koan

Overflowing Cup of Tea:
The Zen Master poured his visitor's teacup full, and then kept pouring.
The visitor watched until he could no longer restrain himself.
"It is overfull. No more will go in!"
"Like this cup," the Zen Master said,
"you are full of your own opinions and assumptions.
How can you learn truth until you first empty your cup?"
- Traditional Zen Koan

The True Path is the path on which
there is no coming and no going.
- Traditional Zen Koan

The Moon Cannot Be Stolen:
A thief entered the little hut of a Zen Master,
but discovered there was nothing to steal.
The Zen Master discovered the thief.
"You have come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler,
"and you should not return empty-handed.
Please take my clothes as a gift."
The thief was bewildered,
but he took the clothes and slunk away.
The Zen Master sat naked, watching the moon.
"Poor fellow," he mused,
"I wish I could have given him this beautiful moon."
- Traditional Zen Koan

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Time to Die:
A Zen teacher had a rare and priceless teacup.
One day, his precocious student accidentally broke the cup.
Hearing the footsteps of his teacher,
the student held the pieces of the cup behind his back.
When the master appeared, he asked: "Why do people have to die?"
"This is natural," explained the teacher.
"Everything has to die and has just so long to live."
The student showed the shattered cup, saying,
"It was time for your cup to die."
- Traditional Zen Koan

What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?
- Traditional Zen Koan

Sweetest Lord, make me appreciative
of the dignity of my high vocation,
and its many responsibilities.
Never permit me to disgrace it by giving way
to coldness, unkindness, or impatience.
- Mother Teresa

Nearly all men can stand adversity,
but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
- Abraham Lincoln

Talent is God-given; be humble.
Fame is man-given; be thankful.
Conceit is self-given; be careful.
- John Wooden

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.
Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
- Oscar Wilde

No man stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child.
- Anonymous (often attributed to Abraham Lincoln)

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.
- George Eliot

Every child comes with the message
that God is not yet discouraged of man.
- Rabindranath Tagore

If a man is called to be a street sweeper,
he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted,
or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.
He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts
of heaven and earth will pause to say,
here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Two things a man should never be angry at:
what he can help,
and what he cannot help.
- Thomas Fuller

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men
who walked through the huts comforting others,
giving away their last piece of bread...
They offer sufficient proof that everything
can be taken from a man but one thing:
to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances,
to choose one's own way.
- Viktor E. Frankl

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance;
the wise grows it under his feet.
- J. Robert Oppenheimer

The man who goes alone can start today;
but he who travels with another
must wait till that other is ready.
- Henry David Thoreau

A great secret of success is to go through life
as a man who never gets used up.
- Albert Schweitzer

A man can succeed at almost anything
for which he has unlimited enthusiasm.
- Charles M. Schwab

Many a man fails as an original thinker
simply because his memory is too good.
- Nietzsche

There are other measures of self-respect for a man,
than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.
- The Bible

The man who is successful is the man who is useful.
- Bourke Cockran

Only a man's character is the real criterion of worth.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

A wise man can learn more from a foolish question
than a fool can learn from a wise answer.
- Bruce Lee

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle.
- Benjamin Franklin

How could man rejoice in victory
and delight in the slaughter of men?
- Lao Tzu

Science gives man knowledge, which is power;
religion gives man wisdom, which is control.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Non-violence requires a double faith,
faith in God and also faith in man.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

A man should look for what is,
and not for what he thinks should be.
- Albert Einstein

The gem cannot be polished without friction,
nor man perfected without trials.
- Confucius

It is what a man thinks of himself
that really determines his fate.
- Henry David Thoreau

A man is a success if he gets up in
the morning and gets to bed at night,
and in between he does what he wants to do.
- Bob Dylan

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day,
teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime.
- Chinese Proverb

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life,
he will lose his reverence for all of life.
- Albert Schweitzer

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing,
and that is that I know nothing.
- Socrates

I cannot trust a man to control others
who cannot control himself.
- Robert E. Lee

Non-violence is a powerful and just weapon which cuts without wounding
and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.
- B. C. Forbes

Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only
by the man who is as well organized
in his individuality as the mass itself.
- Carl Jung

Mystery creates wonder, and wonder is the basis
of man's desire to understand.
- Neil Armstrong

A man who is a master of patience is master of everything else.
- George Savile

Early to bed and early to rise,
makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
- Benjamin Franklin

When you are offended at any man's fault,
turn to yourself and study your own failings.
Then you will forget your anger.
- Epictetus

A great man is always willing to be little.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
- John Morley

Before you criticize a man,
walk a mile in his shoes.
- Anonymous

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing,
and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
- George Bernard Shaw

A wise man will make haste to forgive,
because he knows the true value of time,
and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.
- Samuel Johnson

Money has never made man happy, nor will it,
there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness.
The more of it one has the more one wants.
- Benjamin Franklin

A man in debt is so far a slave.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys
the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist,
and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.
- Albert Schweitzer

Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be,
at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid
as getting to know how enormously much
he is capable of doing and becoming.
- Soren Kierkegaard

A man can do only what he can do.
But if he does that each day he can sleep at night
and do it again the next day.
- Albert Schweitzer

You cannot teach a man anything;
you can only help him find it within himself.
- Galileo Galilei

When I am getting ready to reason with a man,
I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself
and what I am going to say
and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.
- Abraham Lincoln

A man is but the product of his thoughts -
what he thinks, he becomes.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

Man plans, God laughs
- Yiddish Proverb

A wise man hears one word and understands two.
- Yiddish Proverb

There is no limit to what a man can do
or where he can go,
if he doesn't mind who gets the credit.
- Robert Woodruff

The wise man looks into space,
and does not regard the small as too little,
nor the great as too much;
for he knows that there is no limit to dimensions.
- Lao Tzu

If a man does not know what port he is steering for,
no wind is favorable to him.
- Seneca

If a man loses pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music which he hears,
however measured or far away.
- Henry David Thoreau

The more a man can forget, the greater the number
of metamorphoses which his life can undergo,
the more he can remember, the more divine his life becomes.
- Soren Kierkegaard

To measure the man, measure his heart.
- Malcolm S. Forbes

If a man can... make a better mousetrap,
the world will make a beaten path to his door.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands
in moments of comfort and convenience,
but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

There is a sufficiency in the world
for man's need but not for man's greed.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

Intent is what can make a man succeed
when his thoughts tell him that he is defeated.
- Carlos Castaneda

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May the world be kind to you, and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie