Think Before You Leap

....For suicide is, after all, the result of a choice. However impulsive the action and confused the motive, the moment when a man finally decides to take his own life he achieves a certain temporary clarity. Suicide may be a declaration of bankruptcy which passes judgment on a life as one long history of failures. But it is a history which also amounts at least to this one decision which, by its very finality, is not wholly a failure. Some kind of minimal freedom — the freedom to die in one's own way and in one's own time — has been salvaged from the wreck of all those unwanted necessities.
— A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, p. 87.

Unless you find paradise
at your own center,
there is not the smallest chance
that you may enter.
— Frederick Franck, The Book of Angelus Silesius, p. 31.

It is a rare privilege to be born
as a human being, as
we happen to be.
If we do not achieve
enlightenment in this life,
when do we expect to achieve it?
— Echu, in Ibid., p. 40.

It is not that things are illusory,
but their separateness in the
fabric of Reality is illusory.
— Anonymous, in Ibid., p. 50.

A professor who wanted to know all about Zen
visited a master, who poured tea for his guest, but
kept pouring until the visitor cried:
— Stop, stop! It is running over!
— Indeed, said the master, like yourself! As long
as you are brimming over with opinions and
theories, there is no way to show Zen to you!
— Silesius, Ibid., p. 59.

When the eternal truth is revealed,
this Earth itself is the Pure Land,
this body itself is the body
of the Buddha.
— Hakuin, in Ibid., p. 81.

The perfect man uses his mind as a mirror.
     It grasps nothing, it rejects nothing
          It receives but does not keep.
— Chuang Tzu, in Ibid., p. 95.